“Monday’s Vote of No Confidence will expose, in real-time, how Stormont’s system prevents meaningful accountability from taking hold.”
On Monday, MLAs will file into the Assembly chamber for what should, in any functioning democracy, be a moment of genuine consequence where a Vote of No Confidence in Education Minister Paul Givan will take place. The motion, brought by People Before Profit’s Gerry Carroll, follows Mr Givan’s visit to a school beyond the green line in East Jerusalem, a trip funded by the Israeli government and undertaken without a civil servant present. The controversy centres not only on the trip itself, but on the decision to use his departmental press office to issue a press release and social media post promoting it.
At issue is a simple question that should not require much parsing, which is whether he was acting as a Minister, or as a member of his political party. In Northern Ireland, however, nothing is ever simple. Here, lines blur until they are politically convenient, and accountability only bites if it happens to suit the arithmetic of power-sharing.
The arithmetic, in this case, is already clear as we know that Sinn Féin, Alliance, the SDLP and Independent MLA Claire Sugden will back the motion. That represents a majority of MLAs, but it will still fall as under the Stormont rules; a vote of no confidence in a Minister requires cross-community consent. In practice, this means that as long as a Minister retains the confidence of their own party, they cannot be removed, regardless of how widespread the opposition.
It is a procedural safeguard designed to protect minorities from majoritarian overreach, and in its day, it was a vital part of creating stability. But almost thirty years on from the Good Friday Agreement, that same safeguard now functions as a shield for Ministers, insulating them from real scrutiny. The effect is to render votes like Monday’s largely symbolic and an exercise in political theatre where everyone knows the ending before the curtain rises.
This week, the Assembly’s Education Committee also passed its own vote of no confidence in Mr Givan, a rare move that underlines just how isolated he has become outside his own party. When even a cross-party committee tasked with scrutinising his department has formally withdrawn its support, it should raise serious questions about how tenable his position really is. Yet under the current system, that too will make little difference.
The symbolism, though, should not be dismissed. When MLAs rise to speak, they will not only be debating Paul Givan’s judgment or his blurred ministerial boundaries. They will expose, in real-time, how Stormont’s system prevents meaningful accountability from taking hold. Ministers are not answerable to the Assembly in any practical sense; they are answerable only to their party hierarchy.
That reality has shaped the culture of government here for decades. It breeds complacency and, at times, contempt for scrutiny. It discourages Ministers from treating the Assembly as a forum that matters, and it leaves the public wondering what the point of such debates really is. The message it sends to voters is bleak, and even if our elected representatives hold a Minister to account, the structures of government will ensure that nothing changes.
The Good Friday Agreement remains one of the most important political achievements in these islands, but reverence for it must not become an excuse for inertia. When it was signed in 1998, it was built for a society emerging from conflict, where trust between communities was fragile and consensus needed scaffolding. Nearly three decades later, the same scaffolding now feels more like scaffolding that has never been taken down. It is obstructive, unwieldy, and ill-suited to the needs of a society that has moved on.
None of this is to say that power-sharing should be abandoned, or that protections for communities should be stripped away. But it is fair to ask whether the current arrangements truly serve the public, or whether they serve the political parties that have learned how to game them. When a Minister can survive a no-confidence vote despite a clear majority of MLAs opposing them, it calls into question whether the system reflects democratic will at all.
The dysfunction goes beyond a single Minister. Relationships within the Executive have grown increasingly strained, with tensions between parties now spilling regularly into the open. Questions are already swirling about how sustainable the institutions really are, and whether the current climate can support meaningful governance at all. From my own perspective, it has been clear since returning from the Summer recess that the atmosphere at Stormont has soured drastically. Conversations in the corridors feel more brittle, cross-party cooperation more forced. At times, the relationships between Executive parties appear extremely toxic.
Stormont’s architects could not have foreseen every twist of the future, but they might have hoped that by now, Northern Ireland would have evolved into a place where accountability did not depend on the community designation of the person being scrutinised.
Monday’s vote will make headlines, and it will no doubt prompt a flurry of activity for us journalists. But when the dust settles, Paul Givan will remain in office, protected not by public support but by the quirks of a political system that confuses consent with immunity.
If the institutions are to endure another thirty years, they must evolve beyond this point. Accountability should not be conditional. Confidence in Ministers should mean something, and politics in Northern Ireland should no longer be allowed to hide behind the structures that were meant to make it work.
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