Editorial: The Programme for Government for Northern Ireland is so vague as to have little significance

A programme for government at Stormont has been published for the ​first time in 15 years.

Sadly, though, the emergence of such a document is not the breakthrough it might seem.

The goals it sets out are overwhelmingly vague, and easy ones.

This is, in large part, a reflection of the irreconcilable differences that there are between the DUP and Sinn Fein, a system of mandatory coalition between incompatible political parties that would not be accepted in many other parts of the world.

But unionists have to accept being in power with a party that wants Northern Ireland to fail, and whose local leader, Michelle O’Neill, could not bring herself to utter the words Northern Ireland – the self-styled first minister for all who cannot utter the words of the country that most of the people she governs still wants to exist.

Stormont has agreed in increase social housing, a goal of particular concern to nationalists and to Sinn Fein.

It has agreed to provide some funding to cut waiting lists without any detail on the profound problems regarding health provision that MLAs have helped to exacerbate in their refusal to square with voters about the need for a more efficient NHS.

The programme also only includes vague references to policing.

Meanwhile, the SDLP opposition and the Alliance, a party that is within the executive, have agreed on one key thing – that the DUP is to blame.

So Northern Ireland has a programme for government, yet at the same time the province has muddled along without one for a long time. The sad fact is that our political system is so dysfunctional that the new document has little actual value when it comes to actual governing.