Three cheers for NI’s first government programme since 2011, but next time can we ditch the bloody consultation?

So finally, after at least one false start last Monday when the Alliance Agriculture minister noted that none of the Executive ministers with portfolios had seen any of the thousands of consultation contributions the Executive has published a PfG.

I’ve not seen a copy but we have some ideas of what might be in it from Nolan this morning. It has nine cross cutting themes which include childcare, health, housing and the economy. There are social housing targets for 2027 when the mandate ends.

One key aim is to “grow a globally competitive and sustainable economy”, and to speed up Northern Ireland’s sluggish justice regime. Apparently there’s not many other specific targets in the overall outline, but then it only covers two years of delivery.

Given this is the first Programme for Government the governing duopoly has delivered since 2011 it would be churlish (I think) to pick holes in the lack of specific targets. The agreement of one should be marked as a milestone (as the FM and DFM tell us).

As I said on Nolan, specifics can come later. In the new UK administration many of the key metrics came in before Christmas in a speech which many of the media advertised as a reset was actually the detail civil servants need to initiate detailed changes.

What I do question though is the process of consultation which preceded it from September when a draft PfG report was published until March (a full six months of the legislative timetable) on top of the six months it took to get the draft document.

This is an insane waste of time not least because Assembly elections are the primary consultation here. The mandate each party receives is an expression of trust that should enable them to get on with weaving a programme from the get go.

In the Republic the PfG was done and dusted in a matter of weeks (if you account for Christmas holidays). It is only after that that the government can proper claim to have begun its work, or the Dail to have properly started its work of making law.

Even if you lay aside the DUP’s two year boycott, the year that this PfG process has taken to fulfil represents exactly the sort of political torpor that can quickly give way to profound disenchantment with democratic institutions it took so long to establish.

Winning elections confers a huge (and wonderful) entitlement on the winners to make decisions and divide resources on behalf of the wider electorate (and all of it, not just some) as best they can. But with it comes the pain of making actual decisions.

Elections are the ultimate in consultation. Once complete and we know who’s won, why on earth do we need another which stretches to another year and shrinks the mandate from three to two years? Next time, whoever wins, can we just get on with it?