Ben Lowry: London is letting Dublin project the Republic of Ireland as generous with regard to Northern Ireland, and Britain look mean - so undermining our place in the UK
This month we covered the visit of a UK government minister to several prominent businesses in Belfast.
(To read Ben Lowry on the fine July weather click here and to read his article on Luton Airport, click this link here)
The Industry Minister, Chris McDonald, toured Harland & Wolff, Boeing, Airbus, Artemis and other companies.
His department described the visit as one to “celebrate hundreds of millions of pounds of investment” and to set out “how the UK government will be backing Northern Ireland businesses”.
At the News Letter we report on such visits because they are important economically but also because there is extensive coverage in the local media of the grants to the province from the Republic of Ireland’s shared island fund.
Voters who do not pay close attention to politics could come to think that Britain is to blame for NI’s woes, while generous Irish governments are spending lavishly north of the border. Recently Dublin grabbed the headlines again when it announced a €377 million investment into 12 new cross-border projects.
This is a major political challenge for both unionism and for UK governments, if they want the province to stay part of the nation (which I think even most Labour MPs do still want).
People see potholes, crumbling school infrastructure and endless problems in health. Many of these problems are in fact national, and are caused by the same political attitudes among both Westminster and Stormont politicians – a strong opposition to tax rises as well as furious opposition to perceived cuts.
These News Letter opinion pages often carry articles by commentators including the economist Dr Esmond Birnie, explaining that the key financial problem at the assembly is not a lack of money from London but bad management of the vast funding that we do get. We have pointed out how the biggest problem in the NHS is a political refusal to implement expert recommendations over 25 years that NI needs fewer but better hospitals. MLAs will not act for fear of being accused of closing medical units.
This suit Sinn Fein, which says Northern Ireland is a failed entity, that the UK is miserly, and that we would be better in a ‘united Ireland’ (will unionists ever stop using this mellifluous phrase and instead use terms such as ‘shattering the UK’?).
The problem is made worse when unionists stand beside republicans demanding more money, as if the UK Treasury is to blame. After the 2010 general election, I wrote about how the then DUP leader and first minister Peter Robinson stood beside the deputy first minister Martin McGuinness as the latter warned that the UK government was about to inflict “huge pain” financially. If Mr Robinson did not look uncomfortable, it might be because the DUP had just campaigned against the ‘Tory cuts’ it claimed were advocated by Ulster Unionist-Conservative Party pact.
In recent years we have seen more recent DUP and Sinn Fein leaders jointly criticising London over funding. Emma Little-Pengelly has in fairness also said that the Stormont executive realises that it needs to spend money more wisely but I fear that few people notice that DUP ministers are adding that caveat. They just assume the political parties agree that the core problem is a lack of cash from London.
Meanwhile, while UK governments send huge sums of money to NI, as they did in the Troubles. What contemptible nonsense that was from Mr McGuinness, who led an IRA that caused decades of death and financial destruction, while Britain pumped in money to rebuild things and keep society stable.
The UK needs to be far more assertive in explaining its largesse. It recently reached a defence understanding with Dublin without asking for a penny from this country that – military experts increasingly say – freeloads off Britain for its security while spending negligible sums on Irish armed forces. London won’t even criticise Ireland’s hypocritical legacy legal action against Britain at Strasbourg.
And there is another troubling Irish scheme: Dublin now has a €14m scheme aimed at furthering “all-island and cross-border media projects”. This comes at a time when some of the media reports as if the border does not exist.
As the UUP MLA Diana Armstrong said, this cash from Dublin sets a dangerous precedent and comes “with a clear political agenda”. She rightly described it as “an all-Ireland marketing machine”.
• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor