Nuala O’LoanThe British government has a moral duty to ensure that sufficient funding is made available to deal with the problems of the Troubles.
Just before Christmas in Northern Ireland, there was the familiar period of tension accompanying the final stages of the making of the Stormont House Agreement. Now there has been much speculation about what the agreement might mean to the victims and survivors of the Troubles.
Welfare reform dominated much of the discussions. In England and Wales there has been significant action to reduce the welfare spend, some of it very contentious and some of which I fought against unsuccessfully with many others in parliament. So England and Wales has a bedroom tax, for example, where anyone occupying publicly owned property, who has a bedroom which is not essential according to government, receives significantly reduced benefits.
The general aim, also, is to ensure that people are better off working than on benefits. This seems a very reasonable and fair objective.
The problem was that some NI politicians were very unwilling to give effect to the reforms. There is a degree to which that is understandable, given the North’s massive levels of poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, depression and anxiety, much of it deriving from the decades of living in fear. Terror and the constant intrusion of terrorist incidents destroying jobs, homes, environment and so much more, and perhaps even more the mere fact of living in a state of constant insecurity, as many have done, has left its mark.
Inconvenienced
There are those in the North who managed to live through the Troubles relatively unscathed, inconvenienced, perhaps, but not much more. There were police officers who told me when I was Police Ombudsman that they had never had to draw their guns. Yet there were so many more for whom life was undoubtedly profoundly difficult.
Speaking a year ago the Finance Minister, Simon Hamilton said: “A lack of progress on welfare reform is costing frontline public services in Northern Ireland. We have already lost £15m this year and will lose another £105m next year. The total financial penalty will rise to over £1bn in the next five years.”
He was right. The Stormont House Agreement states that the failure to reform our welfare spending in line with the rest of the UK has cost us £114m.
That is money which has been cut from the schools, health and other budgets. It is money we can ill afford.
There is a very serious moral question here. How do we provide fairness in the distribution of assets? How do we ensure that those living with a disability, or serious illness, those with special needs actually have the standard of living which they need? How do we incentivise people to work rather than to remain on benefits? The reality is that the actual unemployment rates in the North are not high: they are less than 7%.
But that masks youth unemployment of 20% compared with the UK youth unemployment rate of less than 15%. One in five of our young people are unemployed. Most of them, like the older unemployed, would love to have a job: something to bring independence, generate income and give hope.
So we have major problems of poverty, marginalisation and people who feel lost.
Hard decisions have to be made about where the money goes.
There are those who argue that the past should lie in the past, and that we should not dedicate scarce resources to dealing with the consequences of our troubled past.
We need to spend our money on today’s economy, today’s education and today’s health.
Yet that is not enough. For a society to be founded on fairness it must reflect and seek to provide for the needs of all its people, and there is one group of people who are at serious risk of getting left behind yet again – the victims and survivors of the Troubles.
The Stormont House Agreement provides up to £150m over five years to help fund the bodies to deal with the past. That is ‘up to’, not £150m.
The agreement also provides that a number of bodies will be established and run using this ‘up to £150m’:
- A Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition.
- An Oral History Archive to provide a central place for people from all backgrounds to share experiences and narratives related to the Troubles.
- Victims and survivors are to have access to high quality services, respecting the principles of choice and need.
- The Commission for Victims and Survivors’ recommendation for a comprehensive Mental Trauma Service will be implemented.
- Further work will be undertaken to seek an acceptable way forward on the proposal for a pension for severely physically injured victims in the North.
- Victims and survivors will be given access to advocate-counsellor assistance.
- A Historical Investigations Unit (HIU) will be established.
- The legacy inquest function will be improved to make it compliant with the state’s obligations in law.
- An Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR) will be established to enable victims and survivors to seek and privately receive information about the (Troubles-related) deaths of their next of kin.
- An Implementation and Reconciliation Group (IRG) will be established to oversee themes, archives and information recovery.
All this is to be done on a budget of some £30m a year.
Is this possible? I don’t think it is. The question will also be whether these proposals for all the new structures, about which there is little detail, will be discussed at such length that by the end of the five years not enough will have been done.
Competent
Establishing a comprehensive mental health service is long overdue, but it will require trained professionals to do the jobs. Establishing the HIU will take at least a year – there will be major problems finding enough competent, independent investigators to do the job which must be done, agreeing and passing the necessary laws, establishing the premises, etc.
For each of the new structures there will be a lot to be done, a lot of training required, and it will have to be done in consultation with the victims and survivors to ensure that what is done meets their needs.
Victims and survivors, many of whom have walked a long, difficult, traumatic road have rights which are undeniable. It is profoundly important that they do not get lost in the current maelstrom of austerity.
Northern Ireland, its politicians and its people, have a lot of work to do to ensure the delivery of all these agreed new services.
The British government has a moral duty to ensure that sufficient funding is made available to deal with the problems of the Troubles. ‘Up to £150m’ over five years is quite simply not enough for the work which is proposed.