Executive Showdown 2
So after a day of listening to briefings that everybody's ruffled feathers would be smoothed over when the Executive gathered inside Stormont Castle, it became clear when the ministers emerged that personal relations are as bad as ever. On her way out, Margaret Ritchie accused the DUP and Sinn Fein of trying to control other ministers. Martin McGuinness said the Social Development Minister was "losing the run of herself".
The vote taken by the Executive didn't tackle the minister's decision to axe loyalist funding directly. Instead it concerned the minutes of the last Executive discussion of the matter. Those minutes back Peter Robinson's version of events, namely that Ms Ritchie agreed to forward her legal advice to other ministers and consult them before she made her move. The SDLP Minister contested the minutes, knowing that if they become the accepted record of events she will be vulnerable to a charge that she has broken Executive rules. The two UUP ministers voted with her, the rest voted to accept the minutes.
Although at one stage it seemed that confining discussions to the technical matter of the minutes might have defused matters, Ms Ritchie's departing comments made clear that the rift with her colleagues has escalated. She followed through with an explosive interview for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s "Hearts and Minds" which didn't go down at all well back inside Stormont Castle.
So Margaret Ritchie is fairly isolated in the Executive, although her policy on cutting the UDA linked funding is popular with large sections of the general public.
In any ordinary cabinet we would be well past the point of no return by now. But of course the Stormont mandatory coalition isn't an ordinary cabinet. How things develop from here isn't clear. Will the SDLP head towards opposition or will the party's minister stick it out, distrusting both the minutes and her Executive colleagues?
Almost as an aside the Executive tackled water charges. Conor Murphy wouldn't give details ahead of a statememt to the Assembly on Monday. But it's thought ministers may have approved deferring charges for another year, taking the cash for water from the rates. However it's believed many of the elements of the recent independent review of water have not been agreed as unionist ministers don't agree with the review's support for basing water rates on the capital value of homes, or its opposition to water metering.
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I cannot put into words how much I admire Margaret Ritchie. She did the right thing.
If the rules say she did the wrong thing, then the rules are wrong.
Who cares what Peter Hain did? We run the show now. We say the UDA shouldn't get the money.
This business of it not really going to the UDA is a red herring. If that was the case they would have said so in August. They wouldn't have said "we won't be pushed around".
They got their prisoners like every other group. They got the chance to make a political impact like every other group. They screwed up. Screw them.
Woodward, you are irrelevant. Robinson, you aren't the executive.
Paisley, look up moral in the dictionary.
Durkan, you still there?
Ritchie, will you marry me?
Mark
WARNING TO RJ AT POST 1
Hands off Margaret Ritchie! You’ve no chance of marrying Margaret because I am going to ask her to enter into a Civil Partnership with me.
So Butt Out, Big Boy or else. Gottit?
Nobody’s messin’ with Margaret while I’m around.
What a Woman!
Susie
Carryduff
That's the trouble with the current set-up with the enforced coalition of the Executive. While I'm sure Margaret is a very competent Minister, as a lone SDLP voice she's being singled out for party political reasons by our DUP-Sinn Fein Overlords.
The Stormont setup really needs an Official Opposition and Shadow Ministers, with the two biggest unionist and nationalist parties joined in coalition, rather than everyone (well, more or less). The UUP and the SDLP could probably do more good in this role than they could in the Executive and give themselves back a unique identity and give the people of Northern Ireland a choice for who's the government at next election.
I had said this over on Betsan's blog, but it really is amazing how much that old 80's programme, Yes, Prime Minister still remains relevant.
In the episode "Man Overboard", the Employment Secretary finds that the minutes have been altered in order to blunt his popular programme (which the PM suspects is an attempt to launch a leadership challenge). The leadership challenge bit is clearly out of the question. But other than that, the parallels are quite interesting.
Sir Humphrey's description of why things are minuted is quite funny and pertinent, although the printed version does no justice to Nigel Hawthorne's delivery:
It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them, and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection; consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials; from which it emerges with elegant inevitability, that any decision which has been officially reached would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and any decisions which is not recorded in the minutes by the officials has not been officially reached, even if one or more members believe they can recollect it; so in this particular case, if the decision would have been officially reached, it would have been recorded in the minutes by the officials and it isn't so it wasn't.
Can't a recording device be installed at Stormont that records official conversations? This bickering back and forth about "He said this, she said that..." Minutes are different from actual conversation, etc, etc.! This cannot be tolerated!
"If the rules say she did the wrong thing, then the rules are wrong."
I think this is an interesting comment and probably one which is the majority view. However it misunderstands the underlying situation, Margaret Ritchie's decision was not designed to stop the money to the UDA, she knew, as the SDLP, that this was going to overturned in court. It was a cynical political stunt in an attempt by the SDLP to make them look tough on the UDA, when they had alreadt conceded they were getting the money
Robinson seems to have backed off attacking a small petite, intelligent plucky female. Maybe he has caught himself on and realised that he was on a loser for this reason at least. Ritchie has the sympathy of many Protestant areas who need deliverance from UDA self styled Saviours.