Michael Walker
So firstly I want to, so I want to start this talk by just welcoming everyone; I'm Michael Walker I'm an Associate within the Private Department and the Reputation Team and I'm going to be hosting today's event. I am very excited to have, Claire Hanna, MP to join us who is brilliantly experienced across the political infrastructure of Northern Ireland. She has been a City Councillor, she's been an MLA in the Northern Ireland Assembly as well and is now an MP and has been an MP for the last two years for South Belfast. And in addition to Claire we've also got Sam, Sam is considered to be one of the most foremost investigative journalists in the UK and, one of the top political journalists in Northern Ireland as well. A couple of his key clients are designation which means every politician, every political party in the Northern Ireland assembly has to either be designated as a nationalist, a unionist or other and then you've also got things like mandatory coalition, so that means you can only have a Government in Northern Ireland if you have the largest nationalist party and the largest unionist party combining together. So Sam to start off with your view and you know, dig into your kind of eagle-eyed expert view of the Northern Irish political infrastructure. For the playground structure to be working in Northern Ireland it would need to be stable and effective and representative. Do you feel that it meets that bar as it, as it stands?
Sam McBride
The title of this session is, is Northern Ireland working and I think the only objective answer to that is not very well. Certainly the way in which Stormont, the devolved assembly here and the executive function as a Government and as a legislature and has been deeply problematic, I think that you've got, you've got a situation where Northern Ireland has tried an awful lot of different forms of Government and none of them have really worked terribly well so therefore I think even the people who support the current arrangements would pretty freely accept that they are sub-optimal the simplest, I suppose and thing that could be done to improve our Government right now would be to have an opposition. So then the question is, how do you move towards opposition and what does that mean for the other structures that flow from the Good Friday Agreement such as, as you said, designation where you basically put a label on everybody's forehead and say you're a nationalist, I’m a unionist and you're, you're basically branded on the day that you go into the assembly. There's, there's not really much room for wriggling between those two positions.
Michael Walker
You would feel that the cure, the most significant 2.41, the most immediate cure then is just introducing an opposition even alongside a monetary coalition?
Sam McBride
There are different ways in which you could do this, I mean at the moment pretty much everybody who has any significant mandate in the assembly in terms of the parties has the right to go into Government. Now they don't have to go into Government, they can choose not to but you could for instance say that you have to have a Government that has unionists and nationalists. A more radical way of doing it and I think a, a better way actually which, addresses a growing problem of people who don't identify either as unionist or nationalist and they, they basically are under the Good Friday Agreement structures which were put in place in a very different era, their votes do not count basically in key assembly divisions. So moving to something like qualified majority voting where you say that for instance, you need to have 60% or 70% or wherever you draw that line to make it fair and to make it inclusive and to and get the balance right between clogging up the system where nothing can get through to allowing unionism or nationalism to basically have supremacy over the other side. Wherever you draw that line you incentivise people towards building alliances.
Michael Walker
Yeah thank you son and, and Claire do you agree, do you agree that the current infrastructure isn't working and there should be a movement towards essentially a voluntary coalition but which has safeguards in it which is almost kind of stripping out the tribalism and the labelling of our politics?
Claire Hannah
Loads to, to agree with there. It isn't it is working and as Sam's got a potted history outlined, it hasn't worked in a hundred years. The architecture is locking in dysfunction and it is in some cases locking in sectarianism. There are lots of people who, who may have a strong view on the constitutional future but who don't wish to solely identify in that way and I'm one of them and err, but it kind of means that you're, you're perceived as that and that, and that only. In terms of the voluntary coalition, Sam, Sam's right actually we all have a perception of what that might look like but it might have looked like majority rule by intransigent unionism or whatever but if you look at the coalitions on different issues that's not how they would probably fall out but the mandatory coalition has no incentive to compromise. If you know that no matter how hard line you are in the election, so long as you get your vote out your, your few seats are guaranteed and the whole show can't go on without you, then there is nothing really to incentivise you to, to, to compromise. Especially if being hard-line has been so lucrative as it has for, for the DEP and, and, and Sinn Féin, but the reality is that the Good Friday Agreement has kind of been our life… lifeboat against a very hard 5.21 so there's some challenges in saying, do you know maybe we should revisit some of the infrastructure because there are those who would gladly say, tear it up you say, have a hard 5.31 did you say, you know and, and who would seize on any, any loosening of the Good Friday Agreement provisions but no, they're not working but here is the reality. They could be made work if people want to make them work.
Michael Walker
There seems to be this third identity which is emerging in quite a sizable way. Sam do… what is that, that third identity and is it becoming sizable enough now that it's going to start manifesting itself in political change?
Sam McBride
The real story from 1998 is the growth of the others - people who, as Claire says, may well in a border pole vote for or against the union but they are not shackled to that in the way that their parents may have been, their grandparents certainly probably where and so therefore there, there is significant movement there and I think one of the, one of the very significant elements of that is, how that, even though those people are in many cases rebelling against the politics of the past but as much as it's a rebellion against that, ironically these people are the constitutional swing voters who will decide Northern Ireland's future now, they are the people who in a border poll, if it comes, when it comes, they will be the people who are open to persuasion, who could go one direction or the other and that becomes really significant.
Michael Walker
I’ve got a third, who consider themselves British first and foremost…
Sam McBride
Yeah.
Michael Walker
…you've got a third who consider themselves Irish first and foremost and you've got a third you consider themselves Northern Irish. If they do coalesce around a specific party and that feeds into election results you could actually see a drive towards the kind of political infrastructure reform that we were talking about. 7.08 if you think that that's possible and that's, that's what's likely to have to happen for that political infrastructure would change?
Claire Hannah
What a society that has been traditionally divided into two doesn't need is to instead be divided into three and there's a wee bit of a danger that people are indulging, I'm not 7.24 Sam but that kind of, well I'm not that, I'm not that so I’m other and indulging the view that having a rational opinion on the constitution whether for or against is, is inherently sectarian because it isn't. So I think a lot of people in that middle section will identify in very different ways, so I think people you know, are, are accepting that you can be you know, a kind of a an eco-socialist, you, you know, have a strong view on the union and are dabbling and I don't think that one party can mop all of those things up. It is worth saying but I think, and it's not breaking news to say that, Brexit has polarised things. I find that people who would have been like me and one way or the other on the union in the last few years have actually solidified and, but I really worry about people thinking the solution to having two tribes is to have, having three instead.
Michael Walker
Do you think that segregation in Northern Ireland society is, is so deeply embarrassed across housing and across schooling and across our political system, that it is very hard to wean Northern Ireland from it or do you believe that the reason there's been a lack of political action to, to desegregate the society is because the ones who hold the greatest levers of power have a vested interest in that segregation because it's a politically successful one?
Sam McBride
I mean on, on one level Northern Ireland has become much less segregated in the sense that going to the centre of Belfast and I think this this is true of most towns and cities across Northern Ireland and there is a thriving mixed community; people come and go, they are Catholic, Protestant, neither, other, whatever - nobody really cares for the most part. The fairer employment laws in Northern Ireland, which have been in place for a very long time now, decades really but are so embedded in our society, mean that people compulsorily really mix with people from the other community or other communities. It is difficult I think in something like schooling to have a truly integrated society, where so many people are educated not, not just educated and I think that maybe schooling is not the only solution to this but it's, it's not just the kids are educated apart but they're kept apart in so many other aspects of their lives, so there are ways in which Stormont has done some quite good stuff there in terms of having separate schooling systems but say you know, sharing a subject where you go to the local Catholic school or state school or integrated school for a particular specialist subject, things like that where at least there is some element of moving in the right direction.
Michael Walker
Claire, do you, do you feel that there has been enough political movement in relation to segregation?
Claire Hanna
I was interested by what Sam said there about, about I don't really know 10.05 but it rings kind of true and there is a little bit where we use the political system to you know, just put a marker down so people are sure like, I am really into this or I am I republican, sure didn't I put my X in the box and then, but it doesn't actually you know, reflect the reality of life and there is a lot more every day mixing there's no doubt about that. In the main, parents don't choose schools because they want the child of this identity or they want them to pray multiple times a day or whatever, they want, they want a good school they want Maths and English or whatever but they want you know, convenience, they want it to be in their neighbourhood, and some of it it's they're just opting into the infrastructure that's already there and you can still live very separate lives even if you don't mean to. It would be very easy to pick your kids up from the Catholic school and they could do Gaelic at the weekend and they might do Irish dancing or whatever and still you know, even though you're living in an extremely integrated neighbourhood, they can live separate lives and that is a problem so the schools are embedding those different lives and those different social circles. Now this is the, the complex bit about how we change that because people have talked about and I think it's a new decade, new approach. Essentially a Ben Blower 11.12 for schools you know, a kind of a report of how… on how we actually achieve some of the integration but if we're struggling to you know, restructure twenty hospitals we're going to really, really struggle we're not great at governance.
Michael Walker
Sam, I know you've written extensively about the disruption that Northern protocol is causing and the toxicity of it. Do you think there has to be a future for it in, in some form and what do you think that's, and what's the impact on the economy would it be?
Sam McBride
I think that because this was so significantly miss-sold to people, it was something that I think frankly very few people in Northern Ireland really understood. The Prime Minister did understand it, we knew that from the Government documents, we know that from the Treasury analysis where they said, this is what it will mean for Northern Ireland. You do know this and you're doing this with your eyes open yes there will be opportunities, unquestionably there will be opportunities but the ability of the Prime Minister or anybody in Government to now make that case is very, very problematic because they openly lied to people. I think also people's practical experience of this is so intrusive in their lives I mean you know, you, you literally see it on the supermarket shelves in terms of products that were there. My local supermarket is half a mile away, I regularly do the shopping. They are just not there anymore. It is having a implication in your daily life and so therefore I think that even if you strip away the constitutional element of this and even if there are as I believe unquestionably there will, be benefits for some people, I think it is a very, very deep problem that will not be easily resolved.
Michael Walker
And one very quick question before wrapping this 12.58 up, is one more question and it's just about brain drain in Northern Ireland and how it's continuing and if there's any clear avenue for it to end.
Claire Hanna
Yeah it is, I mean it is a real issue in two ways; one in terms of skills leaving but also there is a parallel reasonableness stream in that the kind of people who feel stifled by the sectarianism and other sort of restrictions in Northern Irish society are the people who probably go, I'm getting out of here and I'm not coming back, and, and they have a lot to give. This is fixable you know, you can see, you can see some of the you know, people say you can get jobs now, we need people and pathways to careers. You can see some of the opportunities that, that are going to be available to people. There's ways we can lift the Mizzen cap for example, and not export such a large number of third level students, we can choose to fund those places here and there is a bet… there's a good, there's a good vibe at the moment even despite all our problems you know, there are people wanting to come home.
Michael Walker
One of the… when the very short-lived premiership of Erwin Putz began, he had an interview with Stephen Nolan and one of the first questions he asked them is, how do you keep young people here and his response was basically, well the troubles isn't going on anymore so they should just be happy. Do you feel that that's a view, that kind of low level of expectations, that the politics maybe has for young people and what it, it can provide for young people? Do you believe that permeates or do you think that was just, that was just a bad answer by a by a bad leader?
Sam McBride
We can be very negative about Northern Ireland. I've been very negative about aspects of the politics here, it's, it's very important to be truthful about these things and not to try to spin them away. However I come from here, I live here, I've got kids, I love the place I intend to stay here if I possibly can it's a great place to live. It, it very much depends on your, on your circumstances and I don't come from a wealthy background but I recognize that the background I came from is different to somebody who does grow up in somewhere where they look around them and just feel despair about the prospects of everybody that they know and maybe are in the grip of paramilitaries or whatever it might be so I suppose like you know, we can, we can look at the glass as being half, half empty my profession of them journalism I suppose is, is guilty of that but there are lots of aspects of this society that are going in the right direction despite the politics perhaps maybe rather than because of the politics.
Michael Walker
No that's, that's brilliant and that's a, that's a lovely, lovely point to end on. Thank you very much Claire and Sam and for everybody who made sure this, this was able to happen.It's been a real pleasure but have a good day and all the best.
Claire Hanna
Thank you.
Sam McBride
Thank you.
Claire Hanna
Thanks a million thanks for having us, bye.
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