Morning View: Mismanagement at Stormont has made cuts harder

The​ word crisis is easily bandied about but Stormont really does face a crisis with regard to its budget.

This will apparently entail cuts of up to 10% in departments.

Such reductions, while swingeing, are not of themselves necessarily the stuff of crisis. Different countries or states within countries have precedents for such sharp falls in expenditure which have not in fact led to disaster and have even on occasion led to economic success.

The problem with these cuts is that they are taking place in a Stormont that was dysfunctional when it was sitting, but is now not sitting at all.

And that latter problem is not, as everyone says itself an unmanageable context, but rather a problem because power is in the hands of civil servants, because London will not take back full control of the affairs of Northern Ireland as it should, so afraid is it of upsetting nationalist Ireland.

Stormont had already, over a long period of time, shown itself incapable of making difficult decisions. Anyone listening to MLAs over the years would think that any financial problems in Northern Ireland are the outworkings of cruel UK governments that do not fund the province in the way that they should.

Something akin to the opposite is the real position: that London is extraordinarily generous towards NI. Local politicians baulk at even elementary reforms such the way healthcare is provided, or the vast sums that are spent on anti state court actions in the form of challenge known as judicial review. The amount of legal aid spent on endless challenges of state decisions is a huge scandal.

To make these points is not to argue in favour of cuts but rather to say that political mismanagement makes budgetary readjustment in a time of global financial uncertainty all the harder.