Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The Good Friday Agreement and the Executive that flowed from it helped to bring an end to the Troubles and one of the most tragic conflicts in the world. The Good Friday Agreement was an incredible achievement. The institutions that were created, in comparison with what went before, represented incredible progress. However, we have to get real. Twenty-three years later, those institutions are proving to be incredibly dysfunctional. The New Decade, New Approach agreement came about because the five parties in the Northern Ireland Executive could not work together. That the North was without an Administration for three years while MLAs were each getting paid is the definition of political dysfunction.

If one measures the outputs of Stormont, it does not fair too well. By means of a freedom of information request, Aontú Councillor Emmet Doyle in Derry found that between 2010 and the start of the pandemic, the five parties of the Executive, including Sinn Féin, the SDLP, the DUP and the Alliance Party, cut 887 beds from the hospital services in the North. This has proven catastrophic in the teeth of Covid as patients had to be treated in hospital car parks. Policing came into sharp focus recently. In that context, the shocking events on the Ormeau Road in Belfast a few weeks ago constitute another example of why northern nationalists' confidence in policing is at such a low ebb. I might also mention the Stormont House Agreement, the Irish language and the fact that poverty is wholesale in many parts of the North. There is economic dereliction in many parts, especially west of the Bann.

All of this is happening under the gaze of the Stormont regime. That regime and the Executive are affected by in-built instability.

If one party seeks to throw its toys out of the pram, the whole of the North lurches into crisis. The people of the North of Ireland deserve better than such instability and dysfunction. It is time for us to understand that Stormont is not fit for purpose and for the people of Ireland, North and South, to start working together to see how Stormont can be reformed and what comes next. That is why I ask the Minister to ensure that the Government constitutes an all-Ireland forum so that we can start the discussion on the development of stable, all-Ireland, democratic institutions.

See this speech in context