Editorial: Stormont MLAs just seem to give into disputes, rather than challenge them

​Another pay dispute in Northern Ireland appears to have been settled.​

As we report on page 12, unions representing school workers, including classroom assistants, bus drivers and canteen staff, are to ballot members accept a proposal that includes a one-off payment of up to £2,550, and new pay scales backdated to April 1. It is said that the staff regrading process will cost Stormont £52 million.

The dispute has caused disruption to schools and if it is resolved that will be good. Some of these staff are indeed modestly paid. There is, however, a wider issue that is not even close to being resolved, and that is the ability of local politicians to deal with any of these issues.

We were told for two years, not least on endless BBC NI news reports, about the harm being caused by the absence of Stormont. Certainly the lack of an assembly was a grim period because the government did not dare upset nationalist Ireland by taking back control to London and power was given to civil servants, which was not only an outrage but deeply unfair on them because it presented an unwanted challenge to their impartiality.

But the stark truth is that Stormont has not since 1998 been capable of taking the hard decisions that are ever more pressing. Experts have been ignored on health because MLAs feared being seen to be closing hospitals.

And arguments against industrial action were never made and have not been made much since Stormont return, such as the other massive benefits that public sector workers get, including generous holidays and supremely generous pensions that the 75% of NI workers who work in the private sector will simply never get, yet whose taxes help subsidise that preferential provision.

If MLAs are incapable of ever making hard choices, then the quality of our governance and our ability to fund so much as pothole repairs will decline yet further.