One full year of power-sharing in Northern Ireland 

  • Sarah Davidson, Carnegie UK
  • 3 February 2025
  • 3 minute read

Is it appropriate to wish The Northern Ireland Executive a Happy Birthday? It’s a full year since the power-sharing government returned to Stormont after a prolonged political stand-off. A year in which expectations and frustrations have run high, and Executive Ministers have had to decide where to start in addressing the short, medium and longer-term priorities for their people. There is a lot to be done. 

It was a good time therefore for Carnegie UK to be in Belfast last week, meeting the Junior Ministers in the Executive Office, who support the First Minister and Deputy First Minister on policy.  

It’s a decade now since we convened the Carnegie Roundtable on Measuring Wellbeing in Northern Ireland, but someone has clearly been keeping the spirit of its recommendations warm. The draft Programme for Government (“Doing what matters most”) that the FM and DFM published in September included a wellbeing framework and a public-facing dashboard for communicating progress on ten ambitious outcomes for the population.  The Executive might have been in cold storage for several years, but much of the approach it is now taking borrows from international innovations in governance in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Iceland. It’s an ambitious leadership play to overcome the traditionally siloed nature of government in NI. The quality of the work by the government’s analysts was recognised last month with a communications award from the UK Government Analysis Function.  

Given that the value of a wellbeing approach lies in its ability to keep governments focussed on long-term strategic priorities, all this presents a significant opportunity to reconnect the work of the Northern Ireland Executive with the priorities of its people.  By further developing this approach and making the most of its potential, we believe it should be possible to deliver population-wide improvements in collective wellbeing. 

Northern Ireland’s people are badly in need of these improvements.  We were able to brief the Ministers on the findings of our Life in the UK Northern Ireland report, published at the end of last year. As with elsewhere in the UK, the message was stark: wellbeing was stagnant in Northern Ireland with no statistically significant improvement across any of the headline measures between 2023 and 2024.  

 

A year is not a long time to make a dent in wellbeing.  However, when we met Ministers Cameron and Reilly last week, they were clearly getting on with bringing the Executive’s resources to bear on long-term, cross-cutting challenges like violence against women and girls. They recognised that it will take focus and determination over many years to turn entrenched problems around, and that politicians have to earn trust by addressing the immediate issues that matter to people, like access to public services. 

We now await the final version of the Programme for Government. There’s a golden opportunity for ministers and officials to evolve ways of working; expectations of local government and other public bodies, and engagement with the people of Northern Ireland to make the most of this strategic approach. 

The 2025 Life in the UK data will be published towards the end of this year; what picture will it paint ahead of the Executive’s 2nd birthday?