Kate Nicholl MLA: Collaboration isn't rewarded at Stormont. What if it was?

I was in my early twenties and had just started volunteering with Alliance. It was the height of the flag protests, and the story that we had torn the flag down from City Hall had stuck.

In truth, we had amended a Sinn Féin motion that would have removed it altogether. We proposed that it fly on designated days instead, which had been our policy for a decade. None of that mattered. Even then, facts didn't stand much chance against feeling.

I've thought about him a lot recently, because that feeling hasn't gone away. It has found its way back into our politics. My argument in this piece, and the ones that follow, is simple. The things that matter most to people here won't get fixed until those of us elected to fix them rebuild our relationships. That means reforming a Stormont that gives us almost no reason to work together.

Being an MLA takes a certain tolerance for the ridiculous. The chamber has two jobs. It's where laws get debated and made, and it's a battleground where insults get thrown and TikTok clips get secured. We know that, and for the most part we accept it.

In an Assembly full of people who are diametrically opposed on a lot of things, it's always been understood that on the unglamorous work, the bits that don't touch on who we are, we could still work together.

Somewhere along the way, that broke down. For me, the moment I really noticed it was when masked people gathered outside my party leader's home. Since then I've paid more attention to the cracks.

Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, for all that divided them, made it work and were seen to make it work. Even in the 2011 election, their rhetoric recognised that they would be in government together afterwards. Right now, Emma Little-Pengelly and Michelle O'Neill playing camogie together feels like a lifetime ago.

This summer, Drumcree provoked people. For some in the community, it struck at pain and injustice carried for decades. For most, it was a reminder of times gone by. But something else happened too.

On Saturday mornings when I knocked doors in my constituency, I heard the same thing from nationalists, unionists and people with no fixed constitutional view. They talked about what life was like, what it's like now, and how they emphatically choose now. They choose a future of what could be, with no room for violence or division. That should give us real hope.

When I studied anthropology, I read an ethnography that has since been discredited. One idea from it has stayed with me though. When people have no security, when they feel they're on a cliff edge, it's hard to see beyond yourself, and generosity starts to feel like a luxury.

Our politics runs on that sense of scarcity. There's never enough to go round, and there's always a fear that the other side is winning.

Politics here is defined by whataboutery, but what about what comes next?

The absence of violence hasn't meant the end of conflict. It just plays out differently, in policies, in funding and in the chamber. I asked a friend who has spent his career working in good relations whether reconciliation always means compromise.

In theory, he said, it means leaving an old relationship behind, so that things that once felt impossible become normal: being generous, taking risks, even letting the other side have their way. "So much for theory," he said. "In practice, reconciliation is a combination of compromise, accommodation, creativity and joint ventures. But they are compromises for a better future."

So we're back to relationships, and right now they're not great.

In my experience, most MLAs are decent people who care about those they represent. We don't often agree, and all of us have put party before policy at times.

I'm proud of how hard Alliance's ministers work, and of how they try to be fair to everyone, whoever they vote for. But no minister, however committed, can fix things alone. What holds all of us back most is the system we work in.

Collaboration isn't rewarded, in three ways. Financially, if the Executive grew the economy, most of the extra tax would go to Treasury, not here. If a department overspends, Treasury steps in.

Neither rewards discipline or teamwork, so departments work in silos while people's lives don't. Electorally, rallying your own side pays better than reaching across. And in the media, a row gets a clip while an agreement gets a shrug.

Change those incentives and you change behaviour. You also get the stability that businesses and investors look for before they commit to a place.

That's what I want to explore in this column. I'll look at issues through the eyes of the next generation and point to the places where we already agree.

I have three young children, and I want them to grow up somewhere their politicians argue hard and then get on with the work together. We all need and want the same things: security, connection and belonging. Look at what's happening elsewhere in the world, and none of our problems is beyond us.

I still think about that man on the doorstep. I don't think he was a bad person. He was provoked, and it left him angry and frightened. For me, politics should be about building a place where fewer people feel that way. I believe we can, because so many people already choose it every day.