Northern Ireland Affairs Committee — hearing of 17 June 2026: transcript & video

00:00 - 00:45

Speaker 3

Order, order. Welcome to the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee session on Stormont reform. On panel one, we have Matthew O'Toole, MLA and Leader of the Opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the SDLP. I would also like to note at the beginning of the session that we do have Gavin Robinson MP, the leader of the DUP, who is normally a member of this committee, who will be sitting and watching as he is giving evidence in the last panel. So, thank you for coming, Matthew.

Could you explain to us what the impact of the relationship between executive parties and ministers on the implementation of the legislative agenda and program for government is?

00:45 - 02:31

Speaker 2

Well, I suppose the short answer is it doesn't have enough of an impact on their behavior because we have a legislative program which starts off as very aspirational. I mean, in the case of the mandate we are currently in, the legislative program was full of kind of carryover legislation, things civil servants had been working on, things like an administrative provisions bill, which is really clearing byres for ministers, other bits and pieces. They hadn't really agreed any kind of ambitious legislative program. It took them a year to finalize a program for government, which was extremely unambitious, light on specifics, light on ambition. And so I think what that meant and what that continues to mean is that ministers and the executive do not adhere to a coherent plan.

That means that makes for incoherence in government. It makes for the public, I think, being unable to discern what exactly the executive is doing. Clearly, when you have parties who are ideologically different, shall we say, and not just on the constitution, but on, you know, matters of kind of broad left-right preference, you need to have an agreed set of priorities, both in terms of what you're going to prioritize spending money on, what your targets are, whether it's waiting lists or building social homes, the trade-offs you're willing to make in order to achieve those, and what your legislative priorities are, i.e. what you're going to use assembly time to pass in terms of laws. They don't do any of that really in our political system at Stormont. So that's one of the things that need to change because what you get is incoherence, a kind of a word salad of aspiration, and frankly, the public kind of don't know what's going on.

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