Close the Ulster Bypass

Ulster is poorly served by the government.  The Beeb are not too warm to the DUP’s urging of direct rule.  The norms of language are unfavourable; to ‘impose direct rule’.  Perhaps if the phrase were ‘to re-assume direct responsibility’ it would be better received. The language may be batted about, but the new government must face the immediate reality of Ulster’s position, and their predecessors’ failures to address it.

From 1921 to 1972, Ulster was an autonomous region, with a Governor and a Parliament of Northern Ireland, as if it had been a self-governing colony, and Westminster could practically ignore the place. Its institutions and laws were largely sundered from those of Great Britain and forced to fend for themselves. In 1972, the system collapsed in civil disorder, but instead of abolishing the Parliament and bringing Ulster back into normality, London enacted the suspension of the home-rule state with all powers passed to the Secretary of State, subject to Parliamentary assent to actual law-making, and the temporary became the permanent, until Tony Blair replaced it all with a new Assembly, which has been suspended for some years now.

Since 1921 then, Northern Ireland has been starved of all the advantages that the size of the United Kingdom brings. The old Parliament tried to keep up, but there were natural and financial limits to aspiration – that is the ‘Ulster Bypass’.

Today with the Assembly suspended, civil servants are left to run the show with no political oversight, and thus no motivation for innovation or even getting basic things right.  There is no authority to do anything new.

We moan at idiocies in government in Great Britain, but its vast size provides for every sort of expertise, not always wisely deployed, but there, and technocrats have produced what is effectively a luxury service, and we have come to expect that. Northern Ireland, though it is large in area, has a population which is barely half that of Manchester, and that is a small tax base and human resource.  You would not expect Manchester to run what would be virtually a national government, with all the luxuries and efficiencies that Westminster can command, let alone half of Manchester.

Look at a few things we take for granted in our new, modern state, little things but which hint at what lies beneath.

Three sibling quangos in Great Britain, Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland and Cadw co-operate in best practice. Each has a website backed by a powerful database – the “National Heritage List for England“, “Canmore” and “Coflein“, each with a fast and efficient search function linked to extensive research material with academic references and an interactive Ordnance Survey mapping function. Every listed building or scheduled monument in Great Britain is at your fingertips. The Department for Communities in Northern Ireland has a cumbersome listed building search which has not been updated since 2015 the local government reform; for scheduled monuments and state care monuments – there is a PDF typed list if you can find it.

The Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland can provide no linked mapping because it is unresourced:  it sells to a far smaller market and so cannot do all that its counterpart in Great Britain does.  I have spoken to OSNI, and the equivalent in Dublin too, and they say the same:  they are small, have few customers and cannot provide the services.  This too then is an effect of the Ulster Bypass.

Then there is the DVLA: a massive organisation sitting in Cardiff serving the whole country, apart from six of its counties, which have to do their own.  When applying for new car insurance I had to give details of my driving licence – and was met with a message the Northern Ireland licences are not acceptable. Why? Well why would a commercial insurer that has spend a lot of cash tying its systems to the DVLA system want to bother spending more to adapt to a minor registry?  Thus Ulster is left out; disadvantaged because of a bureaucratic separation.

It would take a few lines of code for the DVLA to serve Northern Ireland. It would take little adjustment for the Ordnance Survey to take on six more counties, or for the NHLE or Canmore to take care of Ulster’s historic data, or for the Department of Communities to farm the historic estate out to the great resources wielded by English Heritage (‘Ulster Heritage’ perhaps) but without political direction and a willingness to dig up the Bypass, Ulstermen will be left behind, unable to dream of the conveniences those in the rest of the country take for granted.

Lobbing a wad of cash will not help if the structure is not there:  the structure does exist though in Great Britain, and can be deployed to serve the rest of the nation, namely Ulster.

I can give petty examples as symptomatic of the Ulster Bypass in operation and there could be many more.  Boris Johnson has given himself the title Minister for the Union, as in that role he should take these in matters in hand, and close the Ulster Bypass – otherwise Ulstermen will remain the poor relation in one of the richest countries in earth.

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Author: AlexanderTheHog

A humble scribbler who out of my lean and low ability will lend something to Master Hobbes

One thought on “Close the Ulster Bypass”

  1. Northern Ireland (six counties of Ulster) is not, however, a part of England, to be governed as cheaply as possible. It's a region recovering from decades of civil unrest and economic neglect, with a large population who identify as Irish and who are in law Irish citizens. It has a finely balanced settlement that needs North/South and East/West institutions as well as internal government to operate properly.

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