Last week Peter Hain, British direct ruler of the north of Ireland, issued the long awaited Report on Public Administration. Only Sinn Fein in the north was supportive.
It called for massive reductions in the bureaucracy and the overblown political infrastructure.
The Hain report stated, “There is an urgent need for change and we must now take decisions. For a place the size of Northern Ireland, 5,400 square miles with a population of 1.7 million people, we are both over-governed and over-administered. Public expenditure per head is nearly one third higher than in the UK overall. But public spending is not matched in many areas by the levels of performance such spending should achieve.”
It also called for reducing the number of Councils to seven -- a 42% decline from approximately 600 to 350 councillors! The practice of dual service as Assembly Member and local Counilor would also be scrapped. Some hold three overlapping offices.
Not only will this personally affect all of the politicians due to be sacked and all of the layers of bureaucratic redundancy to be sliced away, but one of the biggest obstructions given to a United Ireland will also be eliminated in the medium term: the disparity of public sector jobs in the north versus the south. Sixty percent of workers in the north are in the public or government sector. The south would never be able to take this burden on board . The British simply subsidize huge portions of this non-economic work force.
Apparently the British government has had enough. The free ride may be over. The people of the UK generally have been against union with the north of Ireland for years and may not want to subsidize it any more. Public opinion in the north towards a united Ireland was also informed by this subsidy. Even the small percentage of the Catholic population that supported continued union was influenced by the deal it was getting or the “non-economic” public jobs they had, along with reduced prices and other benefits.
For unionists/loyalists, add the large subsidy for security work to the statelet's deficit financing of politicians and bureaucrats.
The failed entity that is the Six Counties may not be able to look east to the UK to bail it out any more, while Irish Unity will be looking better and better.
The SDLP and all the Unionist Parties are howling. The business sector is, however, much more sanguine. To a degree, the north is already showing signs of being pulled up by the strength of the southern economy.
For the past several weeks, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats in the south and the SDLP in the north have all been stressing the republican credentials of their parties around a United Ireland. It's starting to roll.
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