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Northern Ireland’s newly installed power-sharing executive issued a blunt message to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday that the UK government’s £3.3bn funding package for the region was inadequate.
Sunak arrived in Northern Ireland on Sunday evening to meet politicians and community groups as the historic restoration of the region’s devolved government ended two years of paralysis.
He will meet Michelle O’Neill, who made history on Saturday by becoming the first nationalist to hold the post of first minister of a region created by partition in 1921 and intended to remain as a pro-UK unionist bastion.
The blunt message from the executive came on its first day back at work. “How we are funded needs to change and I will be strongly pressing that point at today’s meeting,” O’Neill said in a statement.
She and Emma Little-Pengelly, deputy first minister from the Democratic Unionist Party, will meet Sunak at Stormont Castle.
In a letter to the prime minister ahead of those talks, ministers demanded “immediate and durable changes to our funding arrangements”.
“It is clear that the current financial package, on its own, does not provide the basis for the Executive to deliver sustainable public services and public finances,” said the letter. “Whilst additional funding is welcomed it will only serve to provide a short-term solution to the pressing issues which we now face.”
Stormont was restored after the DUP struck a deal with the government and MPs at Westminster enacted legislation to buttress Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.
The laws will lift border checks on goods entering from Britain and staying in the region — demands that prompted the party’s boycott of Stormont.
The £3.3bn package was negotiated just before Christmas and includes some £600mn for public sector pay for Northern Ireland, which has been hit by a wave of strikes. Chris Heaton-Harris, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, called it “extremely generous”.
But the executive said: “The £584mn amount included for pay in the December package falls short of the known pressures of about £690mn . . . and is for one year only.”
It appealed for “flexibility” with debt repayments to avoid the need for damaging cuts worth hundreds of millions of pounds “next year and every financial year” to meet pay pressures.
In her first speech as First Minister on Saturday, O’Neill criticised Sunak’s Conservative party for squeezing the region financially to the detriment of public services, vowing to fight for “proper” funding.
The UK government’s package included a new calculation of how much funding Northern Ireland needs but the executive said there had been “no robust independent assessment or analysis” of the proposal.
Some cash in the package is conditional on the executive laying out fiscal plans and raising revenue, for example via the introduction of water rates — a highly unpopular issue.
Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is also due in Belfast on Monday and will hold bilateral talks with Sunak.
Relations between the UK and Ireland have soured sharply in recent weeks because of the Irish government’s decision to sue the UK at the European Court of Human Rights over London’s Legacy Act.
The Act will halt inquests into atrocities during the region’s three decades of conflict known as the Troubles that ended in 1998.
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