Michelle O’Neill urges Andy Burnham to ‘pay attention’ to Stormont budget crisis

Prime Minister Andy Burnham needs to “pay attention” to the “dire straits” of Stormont’s budget crisis, Northern Ireland’s first minister has said.

Michelle O’Neill also hit back at Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Chris Bryant’s characterisation of the Stormont Executive as financially “irresponsible”.

Northern Ireland is still without a budget for the current financial year with Stormont departments currently allowed to spend up to 95% of last year’s funding.

Ministers in the devolved powersharing Executive have insisted they cannot strike a budget for 2026/27 without additional financial support from Westminster.

Ms O’Neill told MLAs there is agreement across the powersharing Executive to deliver pay awards for public sector workers.

The Barnett Formula, which dictates the bulk of the region’s funding, is calculated based on spending in England compared to population, creating financial pressures for the Executive in maintaining UK-wide public sector pay parity given Northern Ireland’s comparatively large public sector workforce.

Ms O’Neill told the assembly: “I listened to the Secretary of State last week, and he talked about us being irresponsible, do you know what’s irresponsible, to continue to do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome.

“They have never funded us according to need. That is a structural weakness in how we are funded here and if the money is never enough, you can’t ever balance what isn’t enough.

“So therein lies the challenge but yet and all they keep repeating with putting some additional funding on the table but not actually fixing the structural weakness – therefore we’re never going to be able to get into that balanced position.

“So I don’t want to hear from the Secretary State about his charge against us in terms of being irresponsible.

“The reality is, we are trying to get a balanced budget, but it is impossible with what we have at this moment in time.

“The reality is that we must do public sector pay, and what we have right now doesn’t allow us to do so, so we’re going to continue to make this case.

“We had meetings last week, we have more meetings actually scheduled during the course of this week, and we’re going to do everything that we can, including asking for the British Prime Minister, for Andy Burnham, to pay attention to actually the dire straits that we find ourselves in here.

“In terms of an Executive that has been underfunded for decades, and that we want to be able to get to the point where we’ve got a balanced budget, but only if it’s got enough money in order for us to be able to do pay.”