Sam McBride: Behind the DUP-SF smiles, Stormont seems to be returning to its old ways

The suggestion that old things had passed away and all things had become new was undermined by the DUP-Sinn Féin duopoly being headed by Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill, who had been central figures in the dysfunctional executives prior to devolution imploding in January 2017.

Behind the scenes, the DUP and Sinn Féin’s teams retained key figures such as Timothy Johnston and Aidan McAteer whose powerful centralised control had been dissected by the public inquiry into the RHI scandal.

And many of the civil servants who had been revealed to have acted shambolically in handling RHI remained firmly in situ.

But there were also changes – new rules for ministers and spads, promises to change behaviour, the smaller parties were again brought into the executive with the pledge of a collegiate administration, and, above all there was public relief at having any form of government after a three-year vacuum in which the health service was in crisis.

Then the pandemic struck and even the executive was no longer pretending this was a new dawn.

Instead, the parties returned to familiar disputatious ways, culminating in Ms O’Neill’s extraordinary public denunciation of the health minister in the midst of a mammoth effort to save lives.

But in recent weeks there has been an unmistakable shift. The public spats have become sparse and there is a strategic effort by Mrs Foster and Ms O’Neill to present a united – even a cheerful – front.

As part of the new strategy, two weeks ago the first and deputy first ministers did a rare joint interview with Sky News, and this week they allowed the Press Association behind the scenes access at Parliament Buildings, with the photos showing two relaxed leaders smiling and appearing to work comfortably with each other’s advisers. Ms O’Neill told PA: “We had a tetchy start no doubt, things were more strained at the start, but we have had to work our way through our problems”

Mrs Foster similarly downplayed the infighting, saying: “People like to talk about the little bit of turbulence at the beginning of the Covid piece around schools, but I think we’ve managed our way through that.”

Could it be that the renaissance promised in January has now come six months late, forged amid the grim task of dealing with life and death decisions?

One of the reasons why it is still impossible to fully answer that question is also the reason to believe this might not be the radical shift that it might at first appear.

That reason is Stormont’s enduring secrecy. It was secrecy which allowed improper behaviour to thrive in the old Stormont – enabling everything from Mrs Foster’s spad Andrew Crawford to pass to his relatives confidential documents saying that cash for ash was ending to Sinn Féin circumventing the law to operate a hidden parallel system of government in which the real decision-makers were unseen and therefore unaccountable.

The real test of whether things have changed for the better will not be smiling bonhomie between the first and deputy first minister – because we have been there before.

After three years where there was enmity between the DUP and Sinn Féin, it is easy to forget that just weeks before Stormont fell there were smiling joint photo opportunities, a joint article in which the first and deputy first ministers vowed not to walk away, and even a joint spokesman for their joint message.

Similarly, their predecessors – Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness – had, in between their own spats, struck up what ultimately appeared to be a genuine rapport.

Yet we now know that it was in this period, while Stormont’s drivers were smiling and agreeing to drive in the same direction, that the administration was careering downhill.

As some commentators marvelled at the chemistry between Stormont’s leaders, behind the scenes the behaviours later exposed by RHI were becoming more pronounced and more embedded while a weak civil service acquiesced in rule-breaking.

Therefore, recent history shows that the DUP and Sinn Féin attacking each other at election time and then working closely together in government, while it might not be easy, is something which these profoundly pragmatic parties, who have jettisoned much of their past ideology to get to where they now are, learned to do a long time ago. Yet self-evidently that was not in itself the solution to Stormont’s problems.

The real test of whether there has been reform will be whether our rulers change their ways – particularly around transparency – and whether they back tough new reforms which would prevent them returning to wallow in past practices.

On that front, the evidence suggests far less change than the new PR strategy would imply.

In recent weeks the DUP and Sinn Féin leaderships – despite internal DUP opposition – have come out against Jim Allister’s punitary bill which would make it possible for civil servants, spads and ministers to go to jail if they repeat some of the behaviour of the RHI scandal, particularly around hiding government communication on private email accounts, or by leaking sensitive commercial information.

Meanwhile, several weeks ago the Assembly committee which scrutinises Sinn Fein Finance Minister Conor Murphy’s department asked him for all emails relating to his failed order for personal protection equipment via Dublin. Mr Murphy handed over a tranche of emails, but it was only sharp-eyed MLAs who spotted that there were two dates on which no emails had been disclosed.

When they went back to his department, they were told that the emails were “not relevant” to the committee’s request.

Then the department changed course, claiming that the emails were commercially sensitive, prompting Paul Frew – not some hardline opponent of this executive, but a DUP MLA – to last week tell the assembly: “I have grave concerns about the transparency of these departments, the secrecy in which they still conduct business and the way that they treat scrutiny committees with disdain”.

Last week the News Letter revealed documentary evidence that DUP chief executive Timothy Johnston, while working as a spad in past Executives, had also simultaneously been running swathes of the DUP while taxpayers paid him £92,000 a year to be a temporary civil servant.

When Stormont Castle and the Sinn Féin-run Department of Finance were asked about recouping some of his salary, both said they would not be attempting to do so, nor even investigating the issue.

Each of those examples would sit comfortably with past executives.

In November 2015, in his valedictory speech to the DUP conference, Peter Robinson used rhetoric which would not be out of place in the words of Mrs Foster or Ms O’Neill today. He said that Northern Ireland was “leading the way in public sector reform”, that there was “a political process that was stable and secure”, that “there can be a fresh start on solid foundations”, and added optimistically: “We have resolved all those toxic issues that threatened the continuation of devolution”.

We now know that was just weeks after RHI had been running out of control and just over a year before the entire Stormont edifice would implode under its own contradictions.

While journalists should be sceptical, we should not be cynical — not only out of fairness to those on whom we report, but because if we believe nothing ever changes, then when change does come we will miss it. It may be that there have been seismic shifts at the top of the executive and a recognition that the old ways were self-destructive.

But if there has been real, as opposed to cosmetic, change, the DUP and Sinn Féin are doing their best to hide it.

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