Mike Nesbitt’s sudden resignation goes to the heart of what’s wrong with how Northern Ireland is governed. Modest hopes for limited success have been dashed. If systems and attitudes don’t change, the crisis in the health service and others like it will never significantly improve. Independent report after expert report has spelt out loud and clear that if every hospital retains its present range of specialisms, resources cannot be concentrated effectively to deliver timely major treatment for patients throughout the region as a whole. Professor Deirdre Heenan has analysed the particular situation of Causeway hospital in Coleraine where local people fear all except emergency facilities were to be transferred under Nesbitt’s plan and effectively kill the hospital off. Not so, she explains. But hey! Never mind the detail.
There is a more fundamental issue which is political. It’s not easy. You might have sympathy with a local MLA like John Burrowes who is resisting any reduction in his local hospital facilities less than a year before the next Assembly election. I expect the airwaves are hot with comment on the issue as I type. The problem is greater when the MLA concerned is Mike Nesbitt’s party leader John Burrowes who has just rejected Nesbitt’s ideas for compromise and cut his feet from under him. Burrowe’s action only brings to the surface what goes on all the time everywhere. Immediate local issues dominate. Unionist commentator Alex Kane with his usual authority debates the role and conduct of Burrowes as the new leader of the Unionist party as his clumsily seeks to assert party order over chaos – to kill off just the sort of solo run he himself has now made. Burrowes may think from the polls his approach shows some signs of working, even as he contradicts himself. But even if it’s true, at what cost to the community ?
The fundamental problem of Executive governance is that too much formal authority is concentrated on individual ministers and departments. The notion that this gives them real power to take important initiatives is an illusion. Rather than concentrating power it emphasises weakness. History has shown again and again how initiatives are blocked at every level within the same party, between parties, at Executive level. And they go mostly without comment like the inner workings of the old Soviet politburo. FM and dFFM are little more than figureheads. The commentariat and the public are inured to the situation, the civil service bureaucratic box tickers, drained of initiative. Will this latest fundamental failure be greeted by little more than a collective shrug?
The truth is that major reforms like those required over hospital services and the ballooning waiting lists require the political cover of collective responsibility by the Executive as a whole, backing reform against the nimby cases made by MLAs and well intentioned local lobbies. Attempts to create meaningful collective responsibility are resisted by the parties fearing outflanking on their own side and their opposite numbers across the divide.
Mike Nesbitt’s resignation proves if proof were needed that they haven’t shifted from Square One.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
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