£5 million for spin doctors, £4•5 million for hospitality, £400,000 for Photographers – But Question Mark Over Money for Causeway Hospital
14 March 2012
Below is Jim Allister’s speech in the debate on the Executive’s Programe for Government:
“I am sure that our constituents, who sent us here 10 months ago, will be very grateful and impressed that, 10 months later, the Government that were then installed have got around to a Programme for Government. It is not much of a record, is it? Yet today, OFMDFM, as brash and bold and boastful as ever, presents its Programme for Government as if it is what we have all been waiting for — the panacea, the answer to all our problems. Of course, on cue, all its ingratiating acolytes have been on their feet to tell it about the wonderful job that it has been doing.
“OFMDFM was not quite as available when it had to sneak out a written statement to concede how few of the targets of the previous Programme for Government it actually met, how one third of those were never met and how 44% of its key goals and commitments were not met. OFMDFM was not so loud and boastful then. It slipped out a little written statement and did not even come to the House to talk about it. It is against that background and in that context that I and, I believe, many of my constituents will judge this document. It will be judged against the fact that the previous Administration, which was made up of the same people, produced a Programme for Government that they littered with failure to meet their own targets and their own key ambitions. Therefore, why should anyone think that the same people will do anything different this time and that this Programme for Government will not become another testament to the failure of this dysfunctional form of government that is inflicted on us? I, for one, certainly do not expect its outcome to be any different.
“This document is glossy, nicely produced and looks very well. If you simply flick through it, you will say, “Yes, that looks good”. However, its content is utterly vague and vacuous. Of course, it is not really there to secure delivery but to tick a box and say, “Didn’t we produce a nice Programme for Government? Yes, it might have taken us 10 months, but we are very busy people, you know. We have all sorts of places to go and all sorts of people to meet. We really are so busy that you cannot expect us to do better than produce a Programme for Government in 10 months. Do not look too hard at how we failed the last time because none of that was our fault, you know. We are the victim of circumstances. Yes, we are in government, but we cannot really control anything”. And so the retinue of excuses rolls out.
“When I look at the state of our health service, I wonder where some of our government Ministers are hiding. Do they listen to the accounts of people such as an 86-year-old woman who waited on a trolley for 34 hours apparently having had a stroke in Antrim hospital with no provision, no attendance to her and no help for her? That is replicated time after time. Why? Because we have a policy of running down the health service.
“A year ago, there was a hapless Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safety who was ridiculed at every turn and told that he was failing and not producing. That was not because he had no money, because, we were told, there was loads of money for Mr McGimpsey. Yet, now that those who made those charges are in office, we have shambles written over our health service. Why? Because we have the closure at Belfast City Hospital. Oh sorry, that was only temporary, we were told. No one believed that, and it will prove to be otherwise. Now the Royal cannot cope. Now the same Minister wants to inflict the same thing on my constituency in North Antrim by running down the acute services in the Causeway Hospital and channelling much of them into an already overstretched Antrim hospital that is not coping.
“This Government’s record on basic provision on things such as health is one of abject, lamentable failure, and there is nothing in this Programme for Government that will improve anything at all in that regard. All my constituency can look forward to is the running down of the Causeway Hospital and all the negative ramifications of that.
“They tell us, “Oh, we are short of money”. They are not so short of money that they cannot spend £5 million on their spin doctor departments. They are not so short of money that they cannot spend £4•5 million on hospitality. They are not so short of money — you could hardly make this up — when they have recently signed a contract for £400,000 with photographers to take photographs of them. It is such vanity and such farce that we have in government those who think that it is more important to have a contract with photographers to take their photographs so as they might smile out of the newspaper at us and us pay for the privilege than to attend to and fix our health service. That, in many ways, says it all.
“Then we come to this Programme for Government. You could take many subjects, but let me take the issue of upcoming events. We were all glad to hear that in 2013, the city of Londonderry is to be the United Kingdom City of Culture. Yet, in this document, that fact is sanitised out. It is now just the City of Culture.
“I am sorry: its correct title is the United Kingdom City of Culture. Why do we have a Government that cannot even use the proper title? Of course, it is because there are those in this Government who veto and who will not allow the proper title to be used, and then there are those who toady and go along with it. That is why, in the Programme for Government, it is the City of Culture instead of its proper title.
“That is why, according to the Programme for Government, we are now to have the Maze project proceed, with £18 million to create a conflict resolution centre built around the ugly, disreputable buildings of the Maze prison. It is to enable people, such as the Member for Foyle Mr Raymond McCartney, to boast, a week or two ago, in respect of the project, that the listed and retained buildings, including an H Block, the prison hospital, the visitors’ and administration blocks, will be open to the public and that there will be the opportunity for the many stories of the jail to be told. Then there are those who try to tell their constituents that building the conflict transformation centre has nothing to do with pleasing Sinn Féin, nothing to do with recapturing and retaining the prison buildings at the Maze, and that they will be totally separate. They will not be so separate that Mr McCartney does not anticipate using them to tell the IRA’s story of the Troubles, and what a distortion that will be.
“If we need a conflict transformation centre, I ask a very simple question that I have asked before: why put it in a place where it will be tainted by the history of that place, where there are IRA citadel buildings that will taint its every dimension? If we need one, why is it not on a greenfield site? It is simple, of course: Sinn Féin will not allow it to be anywhere else, and what Sinn Féin wants, Sinn Féin gets.”
