Doing What Matters Most: Programme for Government 2024-2027, is already a year late (it was published in early March 2025), with many transformative proposals short of what we need and a rather unambitious and ‘milk and water’ read. Or more precisely a programme that does little to stop the overproduction of powdered milk that is the main cause of our polluted waters, including our ‘great lake’, Lough Neagh.
‘Going for Growth’
The PfG proposes a new ‘Research and Development’ fund as part of a regional R&D Strategy to “support sectors including cyber security and software, advanced manufacturing and life and health sciences”. It has nothing to say about whether the Executive is indifferent to the fact that cyber security might be promoting the further militarisation of Europe or that NI based manufacturing might be part of the supply chain of weapons for genocidal regimes such as Israel. While Executive ministers must affirm a ‘Pledge of Office’ that, amongst other provisions, contains a “commitment to non-violence and exclusively peaceful and democratic means”, apparently this does not extend to ministers supporting the production and sale of weapons and thus promoting violence elsewhere.
The Executive’s big plan around ‘green growth’, with the PfG “ensuring green growth is a catalyst for our economy” (p.78). It seeks to do this though decarbonising electricity generation, promoting the ‘circular economy’ and through technological innovation that will effectively result in the ‘greening business as usual’ i.e. green growth. The Executive’s top priority is ‘Grow a Globally Competitive and Sustainable Economy’, yet zero consideration that a) this might be contradictory or b) economic growth might not be the most important goal. However, the idea that we can simply ‘green growth’ and meet climate and ecological targets while leaving the underlying structure of the economy (except for the energy system) unchanged has no empirical support. We have no evidence, as a 2019 report by the European Environment Bureau, entitled ‘Decoupling Debunked’, bluntly stated that there is no evidence that we can ‘decouple’ a growing economy from resource, pollution and climate impacts.[i] We cannot ‘electricity the hummer’ as it were, as if we can achieve ‘green growth’ by simply replacing ‘bad’ fossil fuels for ‘good’ renewable energy. Indeed, as pointed out below, the PfG does not provide a roadmap for a renewable energy powered economy, given its lack of attention to energy demand.
The document aims to boost ‘Prosperity’, one of the three ‘Missions’ of the PfG along with ‘People’ and ‘Planet’. However, its understanding of prosperity is limited to Gross Domestic Product and this orthodox ‘economic growth’. For example, the PfG states that “Our GDP per capita remains stubbornly low and this is particularly true outside of Belfast” (p.82), and with a hat tip to the Republic of Ireland’s economic model, states its aim to “attract global investment, grow exports, and attract Foreign Direct Investment to support higher productivity” (p.84). On the one hand this narrow economic focus is linked to the Programme’s concern about low labour ‘productivity’, and how the Executive parties wish to align education to skills development and promote science-based research for economic benefits). While not problematic per se, this narrowing of education for example to its economic benefits does smack of a quip from Paddy Johnston, late Vice-Chancellor of QUB that “what society does not need is another 6th century historian”. Should public funding for education be only or mainly justified on the grounds of its economic benefits rather than other non-economic ‘public good’ objectives? Equally, this narrow orthodox view of promoting GDP growth might be in tension not only with environmental and climate constraints, as outlined above, but is in tension with the PfG’s claim to be innovative in focusing on measuring success via a wellbeing dashboard. How will economic growth be balanced or traded off against mental health or energy poverty reduction for example? And the document itself recognises that NI has some of the highest levels of reported wellbeing in these islands (p., despite the legacy of the conflict, our low labour productivity, low per capita GDP, large public sector etc. etc. If asked to choose between wellbeing growth and GDP growth, which do we think the Executive would choose? This document makes it abundantly clear that it will be growth every time. The document reminds me of current UK Chancellor, Rachel Reeves and her obsession with ‘growth, growth, growth’, the monomaniacal pursuit of which justifies abandoning climate commitments or cutting the welfare of the most vulnerable in society.
Lough Neagh
It is welcome to see attention to Lough Neagh in the Programme. While there are commitments to delivery policies on environmental action by the end of 2025, we will have to wait until 2027 (or rather the Lough and those who depend on and care for it will have to wait) for the delivery of the actions in the Lough Neagh Report and Action Plan. Which itself was launched in July 2024 a full year after the ‘blue-green algae’ first appeared in May 2023. There seems to be a pattern here… So, three years from launch to action and four years from the problem first being identified… and all the while the Lough continues to degrade. Think of it like being badly injured and waiting a day for the ambulance to arrive.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the focus on Lough Neagh is the PfG’s utter failure to address the root causes of the problem (industrial scale beef and dairy farming). The Programme only deals with the effects of the blue-green algae via outsourcing or perhaps crowdsourcing solutions via a competitive Small Business Research Initiative to “explore potential solutions to treat/reduce blue-green algae blooms without impacting the natural environment of Lough Neagh and associated Northern Ireland waterways” (p.53). I read this as actually meaning how the Executive will explore solutions without impacting the current structure of the agri-food sector and its unsustainably large cow head and associated phosphates and slurry problem. That is, without upsetting the Ulster Farmers’ Union (and their many friends in the DUP) and large multinational agrifood corporations such as Moy Park. The PfG outlines how the Executive will produce NI’s first Environmental Improvement Plan, which is to be welcomed of course, but there is no recognition of NI as one of the most nature depleted part of Europe, though perhaps this will be forthcoming in the promised Nature Recovery Plan (p.52). Indeed where ‘nature’ is mentioned in the document, it is sometimes in terms of ‘nature-based solutions’ rather than the protection of nature per se.
Wellbeing Dashboard
However, there are some good proposals in the document, such as a new ‘Wellbeing Dashboard’ and commitment to decarbonise electricity generation. Wellbeing, it would have been welcome, though surprising given the orthodoxy and timidity that characterises the PfG, if for example the Anti-Poverty Strategy promised was in fact an Anti-Inequality Strategy. One that flipped the policy approach away from thinking we have a ‘poverty problem’ to us having a ‘wealth problem’, and given how both unequal NI is and that poverty is caused by inequality, why address the root causes and not the symptoms? The PfG ‘Wellbeing Framework’ is useful, and very easy to navigate and you can monitor progress of the Executive across 10 domains.
Of the 9 indicators under ‘Cleaner environment’, only three are improving.
While currently we see renewable electricity falling as per the dashboard below (due to RE production falling below 50% from 2022 to date), the PfG commits the Executive to a “80% renewable electricity by 2030 target…by publishing a final design of a Renewable Electricity Support Scheme”. This is in line with the longer-term ambition, as set out in the 2022 Climate Change Act, for the region to achieve ‘Net Zero carbon emissions’ by 2050. The 80% RE target by 2030 is also what the local renewable energy industry has been calling for.
This push to reduce fossil fuel use in generating electricity is a step in the right direction, and there are also welcome commitments to increasing energy efficiency and home insulation (p.79-80) in the PfG (after all the cheapest and most climate friendly form of energy is the energy you don’t use) as per the Energy Strategy. Though there are no concrete plans, targets or funding for how this home insulation is to be achieved. A worrying omission that is repeated throughout the document (though perhaps to be fair all this detail will be provided in the follow up action plan. It is very welcome also to read the commitment from the Executive to launch a new Fuel Poverty Strategy by the end of this year (p.43). It is a missed opportunity (one of many) that the PfG did not broaden this out to be an ‘Energy Poverty Strategy’ and address the additional energy shortfalls of households beyond space heating.
However, electricity only accounts for around 15% of overall energy use…leaving 85% of the energy system still relying on coal, oil…and increasingly gas. The PfG, in not changing the statutory duty to promote the extension of the gas network, is thus continuing to lock the region into carbon energy overall, and given we have to import gas, thus undermines not only the commitment to decarbonisation of the economy to achieve climate change goals but also undermines another of the PfG’s goals which is to increase energy security. The latter would be better achieved by policies to wean us off natural gas and scale up the electrification of the economy beyond electricity production, such as in manufacturing, tourism, health, transport and farming.
A final missed opportunity here, in my estimation, is that the energy transition as described in the PfG (which on a positive note is consistently presented as a ‘just and fair transition’, ensuring an equitable distribution of the costs and benefits, and also to be informed by a soon-to-be established ‘Just Transition Commission’) does not adequately address energy demand, focusing mostly on the production and supply side of the energy transition. With the noticeable exception of promoting home insulation (which will reduce energy use), there is a missed opportunity in the Executive not presenting the energy transition from a high carbon to low carbon energy system as one that should be premised on energy reduction, conservation and efficiency. The reason for this is that as we see in differ countries and globally, the current energy transition is one where while we see renewable energy increasing, it is not replacing or displacing carbon energy. That is, in keeping with ‘worse practice’ from other countries and regions, the NI Executive’s plan is premised on increasing overall energy consumption, and that despite the increase in renewable energy, this energy transition will result in a ‘fossil fuel plus’ energy system, not a decarbonised or renewable one.
While the PfG has been through Equality and Rural Needs and Child Right impact assessments, like all the other PfGs before it, has not been ‘climate proofed’ in terms of assessing the climate and ecological impacts of its various elements individually and cumulatively. To that extend the PfG is ecologically and scientifically ignorant in my judgement. While the document highlights how the new Executive is using science – for example through its appointment of a new “Chief Science and Technology Adviser and a Northern Ireland Science and Technology Advisory Network” (p.18) – that no assessment has been made of the PfG’s climate or ecological impacts is telling. This is a missed opportunity for the Executive to be innovative in pioneering a new way for governments to operate. And let us not forget that the NI Assembly declared a ‘Climate and Ecological Emergency’ in February 2022, but there is nothing in this PfG, neither in the polices, the targets, ambitions or language that remotely suggests that the Executive really believes that. The Executive’s plan does state that, “The world has entered a period some describe as a ‘permacrisis,’ characterised by economic volatility, political polarisation, growing global tensions, and environmental deterioration” (p.57), but the document has no sense of being a response to that ‘permacrisis’. As such we might describe it as the political equivalent of ‘virtue signalling’.
This is a ‘business as usual’ document, firmly within the ‘Overton window’ of normal policy making, which is completely out of step with the extraordinary and increasingly dangerous climate and ecological ‘tipping points’ we have now reached. And we have collectively as a species reached these points precisely because of ‘milk and water’ PfGs such as this one. If we are destined to be the first species to accurately document our own demise, given the mountains of scientific and social scientific data and evidence of our worsening climate and ecological life support systems, this PfG might be used by historians of a future where parts of the earth are uninhabitable, as a textbook case study of yet another missed opportunity. The PfG should and could have been more radical and transformative, ‘radical’ in the Latin understanding of this term meaning ‘getting to the roots’. While the document talks about ‘Building New Foundations’ (p.64) it largely misses looking at the causes and drivers of the problems we face.
If this were a student essay on identifying the problems faced by NI now and in the near future and proposing solutions to them, I would be generous and not fail it. But it would be a bare pass, and I would give some critical feedback to the author along the lines of the need to better identify causes of problems and not just look at and address effects, and above all being much more innovative, transformative and imaginative given the polycrisis we face and will continue to face for decades to come.
[i] EEB (2019), Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability, available at: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Courtesy of Greenjellyfish25.
