Mike Nesbitt’s resignation is a disaster that will be probably ignored

Mike Nesbitt’s sudden resignation  goes to the heart of what’s wrong with how Northern Ireland is governed. Modest hopes for limited  success have been dashed. If  systems and attitudes don’t  change, the crisis  in the health service  and others like it will never significantly improve. Independent report after  expert report  has spelt out loud and clear that if every hospital retains its present range of specialisms, resources cannot be concentrated effectively to deliver timely major treatment for patients throughout the region as a whole. Professor Deirdre Heenan has analysed the particular situation  of  Causeway hospital in Coleraine where local people fear all except emergency facilities were to be transferred under Nesbitt’s plan and effectively kill the hospital off. Not so,  she explains. But hey! Never mind the detail.

There is a more fundamental issue which is political. It’s not easy. You might have sympathy with a local MLA  like John Burrowes who is resisting any reduction in his local hospital facilities less than a year before the next Assembly election. I expect the airwaves are hot with comment on the  issue as I  type. The problem is greater when the MLA concerned is Mike Nesbitt’s party leader  John Burrowes  who has just rejected Nesbitt’s ideas for compromise and cut his feet from under him. Burrowe’s action only brings to the surface what goes on all the time everywhere. Immediate local issues dominate.  Unionist commentator Alex Kane with his usual authority debates the role and conduct of Burrowes as  the new leader of the Unionist party as his clumsily  seeks to assert party order over chaos –  to kill off just the sort of solo run he himself has now made. Burrowes may think  from the polls  his approach shows some signs of working, even as he contradicts himself.   But even if it’s true, at what cost to the community ?

The fundamental problem of Executive governance is that too much formal authority is concentrated  on individual  ministers and departments. The notion that this gives them real power to take  important initiatives is  an illusion. Rather than concentrating power it emphasises weakness.   History has shown again and again how initiatives are blocked at every level within the same party, between parties, at Executive level. And they go mostly without comment like the inner workings of the old Soviet politburo. FM  and dFFM are little more than figureheads.  The commentariat and the public are inured to the situation, the civil service bureaucratic box tickers, drained of initiative. Will this latest  fundamental failure  be greeted by little more than a collective  shrug?

The truth is that major reforms like those required over hospital services and the ballooning waiting lists  require the political cover  of collective responsibility by the Executive as a whole, backing reform against the nimby cases made by MLAs  and well intentioned local lobbies. Attempts to  create meaningful collective responsibility are resisted by the parties fearing outflanking on their own side and their opposite numbers across the divide.

Mike  Nesbitt’s resignation  proves  if proof were needed that they haven’t shifted from Square One.