The NI Executive – where each minister wants colleagues in rival parties to fail

(Stormont’s bungling search for a Sir Humphrey, at the worst possible time).

It is the more disturbing that their office has not provided an adequate explanation or clarified who is leading the service in the interim.

The Assembly has a duty to pursue these important issues urgently.

Sam reminds us of the need for the integrity and moral leadership identified by former permanent secretary John Oliver. We do not need to look outside Northern Ireland for people with these qualities. They are exemplified by our own Maurice Hayes, for example, who came into the service after a successful career in local government.

The service’s failings do not result only from character flaws in individuals. The Belfast Agreement and its later iterations have created institutions which were designed to corral dissenting political parties into government rather than to improve the quality of public administration.

They provide for the carve-up of power and resources between two blocs differentiated by tribal allegiance.

This division is reinforced and sustained by the requirement for MLAs to identify themselves as Unionist or Nationalist, with Others humiliated by having no say in the Assembly’s major decisions.

Rival Ministers, answerable to their party headquarters rather than to the Executive, run their Departments as independent fiefdoms. There is little effective coordination from the centre. Where is the inter-departmental cooperation on vital issues like health inequalities, early years education, and the rebalancing of the economy? Each party wants the ministers from competing parties to fail.

In this context, senior civil servants have to choose between loyalty to their minister or to the Executive as a whole. Whatever the official guidance may say, their day-to-day priority is necessarily to the political head of their own department. Brexit has exacerbated this tension, with individual permanent secretaries having to serve the diverse positions of competing ministers.

At the root of the problem is the lack of trust which arises from the harsh fact that Nationalists and Unionists have irreconcilable positions on the basic question which the former want a referendum to decide: should Northern Ireland cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland?

What would Maurice Hayes do? We can only speculate.

But the new Head of the Civil Service could do worse than follow the advice in the former permanent secretary Mr Hayes’ memoir Minority Verdict: “…they should be more than eunuchs unquestioningly carrying out the instructions of the government of the day (a role that becomes even more questionable if the government of the day is the government of yesterday and tomorrow too)… the true role of the senior civil servant is to exercise a challenge function, to have the courage to remind the emperor that he has no clothes.”

Dr WB Smith, Belfast 15

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