ANY Stormont deal in the coming weeks will be lubricated, like all other deals before it, with an enormous dollop of cash.
The British and Irish governments have both linked a financial settlement to the latest talks.
Thanks to Brexit, the money potentially on offer this time around is on a scale unprecedented since the early years of the peace process.
Government spending plans for England over the next four years, designed to address the impact of leaving the EU, will cause an automatic 10 per cent increase in Stormont’s budget throughout the same period, or around £1 billion per year.
On top of that will come special Brexit measures for Northern Ireland. The Conservative manifesto promises support for Stormont to “improve infrastructure, enterprise and tourism” and to complete the devolution of corporation tax, which has its own case for a Brexit-related sweetener.
This week, chancellor Sajid Javid announced £279 million over the next two years for Northern Ireland’s farmers, honouring another manifesto pledge to maintain the level of EU subsidies.
While this will not count as extra money in our coffers, it shows the sums being thrown around.
Javid might repeat his predecessor Gordon Brown’s trick of double-counting promised increases but Stormont could still be returning with over £1.5bn more per year to play with.
The most obvious calls on this money are the one-off £1bn the Department of Health says it needs to clear hospital waiting lists and the £500m annual cost of putting off the welfare reform cliff edge, with Fresh Start’s funding for this about to run out.
Rumbling from below is the £300m cost per year of deferring water charges. A £2.5bn related backlog of investment in pipes and sewers is hampering commercial and housing development across Northern Ireland - “no drains, no cranes”, as developers and NI Water describe it.
Water charging has been oddly unmentioned during Stormont’s three-year collapse. It was used as a threat by the NIO, shamelessly and successfully, to force Sinn Féin and the DUP into government during the last lengthy suspension between 2002 to 2007.
The Westminster confidence and supply deal made this threat too provocative to repeat but with that deal dead, the question of how to finance water is set to recur.
Culture and rights issues at Stormont should not distract from how essential money is to the success of devolution. The relationship is so close you could plot it on a graph.
By this measure, a restored executive should have the wind in its sails. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is showing a Trump-like tendency towards high spending, while seeing off Scottish nationalism will require this largesse to be spread around.
The UK economy could eventually suffer overall but enough pounds should keep flowing into Stormont to avoid hard choices for years.
This has happened often enough in the on-off history of devolution to see a ratchet effect at work. Every time a crisis is patched up with more funding, it adds to the ongoing cost of governing Northern Ireland without solving the underlying problem, which inevitably contributes to the next crisis.
Deferring water charges delivered the 2006 St Andrews agreement but Stormont did not find another way of financing the water industry, as it was meant to do. It just kept paying householders’ bills.
Welfare reform brought executive business to a near-halt prior to the 2015 Fresh Start agreement. Its four-year mitigation package was meant to buy time for Stormont to phase in its own measures, such as building more small social housing units to prevent claimants being charged the bedroom tax.
That did not happen and welfare mitigation now looks like another eternal overhead.
The health crisis is heading the same way: if extra money is spent clearing waiting lists rather than on structural reform of the NHS, the cost of keeping waiting lists down will continue to rise.
Northern Ireland’s subvention only seems to interest people when put in constitutional terms - making a united Ireland unaffordable, for example, or debasing our dignity as a UK charity case.
This is all a bit excitable. Massive regional subsidies are perfectly normal in large modern countries.
What makes Northern Ireland unusual is how we crank our subsidy up every few years by demonstrating political dysfunction, only to pocket the money without addressing the dysfunction. How many more cycles of this can there be?
