It is best not to focus too closely on the Programme for Government – a glossy civil service production that tells us nothing about what will actually be decided on the main issues. As usual almost all the contentious issues – raising local revenue, paying for Casement and policing, reforming Health and Social Care and the rest, have been left for last minute negotiation behind closed doors.
This issue focuses on some more immediately pressing concerns. The twin articles on the rioting and anti- immigrant violence point clearly to the need for less negotiation with paramilitaries and more resolute policing and protection. As in the Republic, we have relatively lower levels of immigration than in Britain and Europe but depend equally heavily on immigrants for health and social care and much else. But political and administrative recognition of these changing demographic trends and the need for more positive policies on integration in both parts of Ireland are missing.
The continuing controversies over legacy issues also need a firmer and fairer approach. The interminable litigation by victims in both communities to secure marginal victories in the courts serves more to entrench conflicting narratives of the Troubles than to encourage reconciliation. And there has been little progress in establishing any kind of balanced assessment of the faults on all sides.
Whether we can rely on the two Governments to impose some clarity and cohesion on all these matters remains to be seen. The new Labour Government has not started well in creating a kind of hierarchy of victims in respect of public inquiries and a lack of balance in approving city deals. Nor has the commitment by the Irish Government to its interstate case against the United Kingdom at Strasbourg helped to foster reconciliation. What is needed is a friendly settlement and a joint approach to all the issues of the kind that produced the Good Friday settlement. But that may have to await the results of the election in the Republic.
View Issue 495