Declassified documents released on Tuesday by Northern Ireland’s state archive reveal the pressures on a power-sharing government trying to find its feet in the immediate post-conflict period while grappling with issues that remain sticking points today.
“Despite careful planning, we seriously underestimated the impact of devolution across the Department,” was the assessment of the permanent secretary at the Department of Education, Nigel Hamilton, in a letter from March, 2000.
“This was certainly exacerbated by the fact that we had a very high-profile Minister who attracted huge media interest and also interest within the Assembly.”
That high-profile minister was Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, former IRA commander and at the time Minister for Education in the new, devolved parliament at Stormont set up following the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
RM Block
For the first time, unionists and nationalists were sharing power in Northern Ireland; his appointment, in 1999, was a watershed moment.
The first Sinn Féin minister in the history of the North, McGuinness’s appointment underlined that Northern Ireland not only had a new form of government, but a new political reality. Nationalist ministers were now at the Executive table, and they were there to stay.
But at the Department of Education, civil servants were struggling to keep up with the additional workload. “To be absolutely blunt, we were stretched to the limits,” wrote Hamilton.
Other departments were also feeling the pressure. The Department of Regional Development – where the minister was the future first minister, the DUP’s Peter Robinson – was “close to breaking point” at the end of the first 72 days of devolution. That gloomy assessment was reported by its permanent secretary, Ronnie Spence, in February, 2000.
At the Department of Further and Higher Education, under minister Sean Farren of the SDLP, they were “stretched . . . to the limit” wrote Spence’s counterpart, Alan Shannon, the same month.
In a sign of instabilities to come, Stormont had just been suspended for the first time – in this instance, over the IRA’s failure to decommission its weapons – and the civil service used this period to reflect on the lessons learned.
Summarising the feedback from an away day for the newly-created Office of the First and Deputy First Ministers (OFMDFM) in May, 2000, private secretary Billy Gamble noted business was “generally slower than under direct rule”. He added that the decision-making process was “more complex and protracted”.
There was “a huge increase in the volume of papers . . . this ‘paper rush’ placed an enormous burden . . . Ministers (and advisers) were of the view that events were ‘running Ministers’ and that not enough quality time was available for Ministers to think strategically.
He added: “On the legislative front, devolution had brought an increased workload, new areas of work, pressures on timescales, and higher expectations in respect of legislation.”
He identified challenges which, more than two decades on, still trouble Stormont. They included the delay caused by “the shared nature of the offices of FM and DFM and the requirement for them jointly to approve substantive decisions”. He also made reference to the need for effective communication between, and often within, government departments, the Executive and Assembly.
Another newly-appointed nationalist minister, the deputy first minister and deputy leader of the SDLP Seamus Mallon, had limited sympathy for the civil service. However, he acknowledged OFMDFM “did not have the ‘infrastructure’ to handle the demands on it”.
In a confidential note summarising an interview with Mallon from May, 2000, a civil servant observed he “seemed to be resentful of civil servants in what they put in front of him – poor diary control and not doing enough of the things that he believed he should be doing, eg getting out and about etc“.
He made “adverse comments on the culture of NICS (Northern Ireland Civil Service) and the need to change”.
“Civil servants thinks (sic) NI ends ‘at Finaghy Cross Roads’ (on the outskirts of Belfast) – want to go to Coleraine, etc.”
The documents reveal an awareness of the precariousness of power-sharing and of the need to build public support for the new Executive and Assembly, as well as attempts to begin dealing with some of the many problems facing Northern Ireland as it emerged from a 30-year conflict.
These included many unforeseen issues, including, in January 2000, the need to consider, for the first time, the controversial issue of the flying of the Union flag from government buildings.
Eventually referred to the OFMDFM solicitor, he concluded that devolution made it a choice for Belfast, not London – “for individual Ministerial discretion”.
Reading through the piles of newly-released documents, it is striking how many of the challenges which appear and reappear through the papers are all too familiar, from tackling sectarianism to plans for water charges, provision for Irish and Ulster Scots, the construction of the still-unopened Belfast Maternity Hospital, concerns over climate change and pollution, and the pressures on the health service.
“Like all health services across the UK and in the Republic of Ireland . . . Northern Ireland is struggling under the combined effect of increasing demands and public expectation, rising standards of clinical and social care governance and spiralling costs,” the permanent secretary at the Department of Health, DC Gowdy, wrote. It was yet another observation which might just as easily have been written in 2025 as 2005.
From the remove of 20 years, or more, it is both striking and sobering to see how many of these issues remain stubbornly unresolved.
