The choreography and optics of “Northern Ireland is now open for business” may be helping to restore the ‘market’ and self-confidence in Stormont.

Meanwhile, a game which looks like a cross between Chicken, Chess and Monopoly is being played on the hill between ministers all still running their own ministerial independent fiefdoms, and protecting their own share of what is clearly not enough.

Beneath the fanfare, pomp and propaganda, the reality remains.

When a budget is agreed, it will be for one year only, according to the Minister of Finance.

In 2025, Stormont will therefore return to ground zero, and will be “another year older and deeper in debt”.

That means that every publicly-funded organisation, whether funded by Health Trusts, the Educational Authority, DAERA or any other department or public agency has no agreed annual budget either.

How can effective and efficient services be provided without a clear indication of the resources that will be available to deliver them?

The best that can be done practically is to hold to the strategic plan for now, plan the detail of the first three months’ delivery based on last year’s budget, and calculate a full recovery cost; monitor that monthly, and hope for a budget and income before July 1, knowing that you will most likely have to work within significantly reduced expenditure for the next nine months as a result.

Even if you have a protected budget, inflation will mean you will have to choose between reducing services or acquiring debt!

With only a one-year budget, you cannot effectively plan the level of the reduction of one, or the increase of the other, in the longer term, and effectively mitigate the risk to sustainability of the organisation.

I could be wrong, but I calculate this to be the eighth consecutive year in which those delivering publicly-funded services have been placed in this position.

Stormont and NIO have failed each year to agree a strategic plan for government; devise a timely budget, or have the faintest idea how to secure the resources needed to develop the physical, policy or service delivery infrastructure needed to get us out of the depth of systemic failure we currently endure.

There isn’t a single private; not-for-profit; or charitable company in the jurisdiction that could, or would be allowed to continue to operate on that basis.

It would be almost impossible for them to secure investment, credit, or tender for contracted work, or government grants.

Banks and creditors would long since have forced their hands, and they would be in voluntary administration or bankruptcy proceedings.

But The State is not an incorporated business – it is the administrative infrastructure to which the citizens delegate responsibility.

It is the responsibility of The State, which society finances, primarily through taxation, to provide society with its collective needs, regardless of who is in government.

Northern Ireland is not a State. Like the Scottish and Welsh Administration Units, it is no more and no less than an administrative unit of the UK State to which certain responsibilities have been devolved.

The State is the United Kingdom.

How people feel about that has no bearing on its reality. Neither does The Good Friday Agreement!

Stormont’s debt is therefore the State’s debt to itself. The Chancellor could and should strike it out.

Failure to do so condemns Stormont to inevitable failure, or drives them towards the UK Tory goal of privatisation, and commodifying social need.

This is called ‘asset stripping’, and is a fairly standard move by unethical private profiteers, before putting the company into administration and selling it off as ‘scrap’.

The First Minister and Deputy First Minister might have been better spending time facing down St. George’s dragons in London than strutting their stuff for the highest bidders in Washington, in the political interests of genocidal geriatrics, and private venture vultures.

*****

“A week is a long time in politics.” Harold Wilson coined this phrase way back in 1964. The occasion of the quote was the election of a Labour government.

That well-known gambling den – the ‘financial market’, which dictates the rules of Western democracy – responded with considerable hostility, creating a crisis in the value of the British Pound.

The speed of the crisis was not unlike that which welcomed the short tenure of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of a Conservative Government more recently.

If the independent research capacity and memory of the average political commentator on social media was not less than mediocre, everyone would already know that.

Perhaps, it is in the best interests of Keir Starmer’s ambition to be Prime Minister that they don’t.

I don’t think Tory-Lite will be Tory enough for the market, or Labour enough to compensate for the chill.

The Israel fund for influencing politicians will also have run dry by then.

*****

April marks the start of another New Year – the financial year.

My best wishes go to all those managing community and voluntary organisations, for whom this is a stressful period of chasing final invoices, turning around annual financial reports for funders, 95 per cent of whom will have received quarterly financial and on-financial reports throughout the year, as well as prior notification requests for permission to move funds from one expenditure heading to another to meet changing needs.

Deadlines will not automatically have taken account of the early Easter. Stress levels will be high.

Managers will have taken work home over the Easter break, and will be returning to their place of employment even more exhausted than they were last week.

Many people working within public services, including our too-often maligned civil servants, are also under significantly increased pressures under the weight of a collapsing policy and administration infrastructure, and the return of ministers and politicians.

Currently full of themselves with about as much contrition for their shenanigans as Genghis Khan, they will be playing catch-up, and clicking ‘entitled’ fingers at the people who translate their rhetoric into policy and practice; output and outcomes, evaluations, statistics and end-of-year reports.

I am now relieved of such pressure, but send solidarity to all those up to their ‘oxters’ in it as Northern Ireland starts the new financial year, 2024-2025, without Stormont having agreed a budget.