Why Stormont’s failure to revenue raise is costing us all

In June 2000, during a debate over departmental funding from Westminster, a former MLA gleefully remarked that the “injustices of direct rule were over” and that, with the Assembly now in control of its own affairs, local politicians “no longer [had] to go cap-in-hand to Northern Ireland Office Ministers, as so often in the past”. Some twenty-six years on, the MLAs present in the chamber that day may lament how little has changed. With a recent RaIse briefing paper describing the Assembly’s...