Stormont is getting better at hiding how bad things really are

Sam McBride, Northern Ireland Editor, Belfast Telegraph, September 3rd, 2025

At the end of last year, I wrote something which I don’t do very often: The optimistic case for why Stormont could be better in 2025. 

After covering the devolved institutions in depth for more than 15 years, my well of optimism for devolution ran dry long ago. Yet journalists can often be poor predictors of the future.

We are so well versed in human frailty, so alive to the innumerable areas in which something could go wrong, and pick up so much gossip about unseen tensions or problems that we can be blind to the fact that human beings can also be extraordinarily resilient, problems can be overcome, and if private tensions stay unseen then their impact may be limited.
 
Often things turn out better than people like me fear. Even in recent memory, the gloomiest analysis – overwhelmingly founded in what were reasonable fact-based assumptions – at the start of covid, the Trump presidency, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine haven’t, mercifully, been borne out.

I am at heart a thoroughly optimistic person. I relish life, enjoy my job, love Northern Ireland, and don’t spend every waking hour worrying about what might go wrong – in fact, I often don’t spend enough time worrying about what might go wrong and then it does, but enough about my foibles.

Last December’s article wasn’t an attempt to will into existence a fictional Stormont; a solitary journalist has no such power – nor indeed would every journalist if we all suddenly gushed pure positivity about our rulers. Facts are stubborn beasts and don’t vanish just because they go unreported.

But the article was informed by the season, just a few days before Christmas. Few of us live cloistered lives; we’re influenced by what’s going on around us and amid the December festivities, the lights and the hope of Christmas it’s hard not to feel some sense of optimism.

Everything I wrote in the article was my sincere belief at the time. It wasn’t that I believed this was the most likely outcome – I didn’t – but I thought it possible because there existed an exceedingly rare window for necessary but unpopular decisions.

Next week sees the Assembly’s return after a long summer recess – far too long for an institution which hasn’t functioned at all for so much of this mandate. But I don’t need to wait until December to say that what I thought might happen in 2025 hasn’t happened, and isn’t going to happen.

This was cheerful, but wrong
 
The Executive has continued to run away from difficult decisions. It decries not being given even more money by London, but refuses to use its own tax-raising powers (it can tax most things except income) to bring in more money from the rich (or the poor or whoever else it thinks should be taxed).
 
The pathetic politicking around the A5 has shown that this Executive can’t take mature decisions even when two of the most profound issues are at stake – human lives and the future of the planet on which we live.
 
Even the simplest task – putting a bollard at the bottom of Hill Street in Belfast to pedestrianise something the minister says she wants pedestrianised – still has been beyond the capabilities of this system of government.
 
Indeed even the superficially positive relationship between Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly is now very different.
 
The primary responsibility for this rests with politicians because it is politicians who have the power to change laws and give binding orders to civil servants.
 
But one of my reasons for optimism was what I was picking up from a cross-section of political and civil service sources – but particularly from the DUP: that the head of the civil service, Jayne Brady, may have been on her way out.

No single person can be fully responsible for the ills of an organisation as vast as the civil service. When Ms Brady arrived, it was already broken – and she hadn’t broken it. But she hasn’t fixed it, and that was the key reason she was hired as the first external head of the civil service.
  
Her leadership has been consistently cautious. She has stumbled in front of open goals where she could have made clear by actions rather than words that she would take no nonsense. Instead, she’s wallowed in management-speak.

The organisation has limped along on life support, reliant on funnelling millions of pounds every year to consultants to perform what ought to be basic civil service tasks. Morale is subterranean. Officials have become experts at explaining away project delays, inaction, and gaffes. This once-great organisation is unrecognisable from that which was central to keeping our society functioning amid the hell of the Troubles.
  
Yet two days ago, we revealed that what the taxpayer is paying for Ms Brady has leapt by £30,000 in a single year. Her total remuneration is now £275,000, vastly beyond that of the First Minister, deputy First Minister or even the Prime Minister.

If this was being paid for someone who had revolutionised the civil service, it would be money well spent. Instead, the incoherence of this system is exemplified by how it has handled my simple questions about this.

Jayne Brady hasn’t fixed the civil service – but is getting rewarded regardless

A week ago, I asked The Executive Office who had approved this huge increase. After two days of thinking about it, Ms Brady’s department dumped the query on the Department of Finance. It responded with a statement which didn’t answer that question.

I asked the question again and was told it would take another couple of days to answer because of the weekend (stereotypes aren’t always wrong). After the weekend it still didn’t come so I asked again. I was told a response would come “as soon as possible”. It didn’t come. I asked again. Finally, an hour ago I got an email with a response.

I feel sympathy for the officials handling my queries on this debacle because I know how the system works. They will not be decision-makers as to what is being said. Indeed, they may even be sending sage advice up the line. But what on earth sort of bureaucracy takes more than a week to be able to answer a question which should be as simple as checking a file or ringing Ms Brady and asking her who did her appraisal?

Ministers deserve – and we give them – the greatest scrutiny. But senior officials who are paid far more than ministers also deserve scrutiny. I fear that this Stormont is just getting more skilled in hiding how bad things really are. What might be expedient in the short term for some people is storing up incalculable future pain.

Maybe as ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen’ wafts across light-lined streets I’ll be feeling a bit more optimistic…
 
That’s all for this week. See you next week.