Ben Lowry: The hysterical response to my tweet shows how Northern Ireland could become ungovernable

Thank goodness for the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO).
Chris Hazzard MP, back, said Ben Lowry had “spouted bile” about vulnerable children, while Michelle Gildernew MP said he had hit a “new low," yet the News Letter deputy editor was referring to a damning Audit Office report about the sustainability of the current special needs systemChris Hazzard MP, back, said Ben Lowry had “spouted bile” about vulnerable children, while Michelle Gildernew MP said he had hit a “new low," yet the News Letter deputy editor was referring to a damning Audit Office report about the sustainability of the current special needs system
Chris Hazzard MP, back, said Ben Lowry had “spouted bile” about vulnerable children, while Michelle Gildernew MP said he had hit a “new low," yet the News Letter deputy editor was referring to a damning Audit Office report about the sustainability of the current special needs system

The News Letter keeps copies of NIAO reports going back years.

Sometimes the NIAO examines big scandals such as Cash for Ash (RHI) or smaller ones such as the Bioscience and Technology Institute, which lost £2.2m of taxpayer funds.

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Sometimes it looks at things such as publicly owned sites flipped for profit. Remember the site on Belfast’s Malone Road sold for a £1m below its value, then resold the same day? Or the one on St George’s Street near the Westlink, resold hours later for a £3.2m gain?

Often the Audit Office is dealing with wider aspects of public expenditure such as why procurements in NI go over budget.

Bad use of public cash in Northern Ireland keeps happening, despite an Audit Office to expose it, so I shudder to think what would happen if there was no such scrutiny.

This week the Audit Office released a report on provision of Special Educational Needs (SEN).

It was damning stuff (see panel below).

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I tweeted out our story on NIAO report and said: “This is another colossal expenditure. It’s been brewing for years. It’s plainly not sustainable yet Stormont says little about it because it sounds harsh to curb it. Like welfare reform and NHS reform it’s easy to duck it and let it soak of vast amounts of precious public funds”.

It was the beginning of an almost unending Twitter storm.

As it happens I strongly agree with the auditor, Kieran Donnelly, who said: “Support for pupils with SEN is a vital and valued service and the educational achievements of children with SEN are improving, which, of course is to be welcomed.”

The rise of, for example, autism in recent decades is a complex issue, and like everyone else I know families for whom it has caused immense challenges and anxiety.

I could have phrased my tweet more softly, but there is limited space in a tweet, and I was attacking the rising cost, not the children.

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One of the first responses to me came from the SDLP councillor Séamas de Faoite who claimed it showed the News Letter wanted to “go after funding for special educational needs instead of, say, the cost of our segregated education”.

But I was stating my view, not the paper’s, and unlike the SDLP I always backed a single school system.

An Andersonstown News columnist, Squinter, said my spending examples were “special needs; people on benefits; sick people”.

Then he said: “If you punched any lower you’d hit the canvas.

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Yes, I did give those examples, because I have written before about how 212,000 people – one person in eight – in NI was on Disability Living Allowance before its reform (see link below).

As is obvious, any huge expansion in the number of people eligible for a benefit reduces the pool of money for beneficiaries in most need (eg the severely disabled).

And as to health, it was the highly respected civil servant Maurice Hayes who in 2000 led the first of multiple reviews into the NHS in NI. A series of experts later agreed with him that NI needs a smaller number of world class hospitals to improve health outcomes (see link below).

But politicians are so terrified of being seen to close hospitals that they have ducked it. January’s deal to restore Stormont finally included a cross party pledge to implement the latest expert report (Bengoa) calling for such reform.

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All three cases — disability, NHS, SEN — are part of the welfare safety net that is the hallmark of a decent society. But all are potentially limitless expenses that need monitored.

Yet thousands of people attacked my tweet or liked other tweeters who did. Two Sinn Fein MPs joined the fray: Chris Hazzard accused me of “spouting bile about vulnerable children” (a contemptible misrepresentation of my tweet) and Michelle Gildernew said I had “hit a new low”.

Criticism became absurd. I was accused of being a eugenicist and wanting euthansia for the disabled and so being a pro life hypocrite (in fact I had advocated modest abortion liberalisation in NI to avoid the horrific late term terminations of GB, which we will now have. That puts me somewhere on the pro choice spectrum — see link below).

Dozens of tweeters said I wanted to fund a bridge to Scotland yet wanted to cut funds to disabled kids (yet I wrote on these pages recently that a bridge to GB was a “distant dream” and not viable financially see link below).

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Given such stupidity and hysteria, it is no surprise that politicians rarely admit (let alone confront) a spiralling and unsustainable cost.

David Goodhart, a commentator who has become sceptical about the impact of some liberal views, has warned that permanent outrage on social media (Twitter, Facebook etc) could make society ungovernable.

On P8 today Sam McBride writes about the inability of our leaders even to install a head of the civil service.

Meanwhile, fiscal responsibility at Stormont is a remote prospect.

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I hope that our fine western civilisation never becomes ungovernable, but if it does then I fear Northern Ireland will be first to fall.

• The Audit Office Report into special educational needs (summary of it here and below that a link to it)

The report is 70 pages long, and the full PDF of it is in the link below. If you do not have time to read it, then it has a good five page executive summary. And if you don’t even have time for that, you only need to read a one-page media release.

Auditors concluded that “an urgent review and overhaul of SEN policies and processes is needed to respond to rising costs and increasing demand”.

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The report pointed out that nearly one in five pupils in NI has a reported special educational need, with 5.5% of the school population having a statement of SEN (a legally binding document that confirms the need).

“This is significantly higher than the 2% of the school population anticipated by the department,” says the report.

The Audit Office in a 2017 report outlined the need for the Education Authority to show value for money as to the provision of SEN amid rising costs and it made 10 recommendations. It identified inconsistencies in the assessment of children and unacceptable delays.

Now the Audit Office says that, three years later, “the significant issues in our 2017 report persist”. In fact a department of education review into SEN has still not been finished 13 years later.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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