In an enormously welcome example of cross-border cooperation, the Republic's Department of Health has stepped in with an offer to fund 250 student nursing and midwifery places in the north.
Health minister Stephen Donnelly proposes funding 200 places for students from the Republic and for 50 from Northern Ireland at Queen's and UIster University. The arrangement will cost the Dublin government €10 million and run for one year; perhaps there is a hope that by then, Stormont will have worked out how to pay for the nurses' training itself.
All of the students who graduate from the Republic-funded scheme will be free to take up jobs in the north's health and social care system.
This is a hugely positive development, and comes just weeks after Stormont's Department of Health said it would have to discontinue 300 training places, a move which was branded as disastrous by unions, politicians and others; there are around 3,000 nursing vacancies in Northern Ireland.
The 300 places were part of the New Decade, New Approach deal to revive power-sharing.
But with that scheme coming to an end, officials at Stormont said they were unable to continue to fund the extra places - thus reducing the student numbers to a 'baseline' of 1,025 - as they sought to square the department's spending with the cuts imposed for this financial year by secretary of state Chris Heaton-Harris.
Although its allocation of around £7 billion is essentially ‘flat’ compared to last year, in real terms it amounts to a cut because of the same cost of living demands being felt by households, families and businesses. The department is also facing a raft of pay demands, which it says it cannot meet without drastically scaling back frontline services.
Mr Heaton-Harris's punishment budget has put senior officials at Stormont in a highly difficult position, with the spectre of cuts to vital services for the most vulnerable in our community. Take the Department of Education, as but one example, where the holiday hunger and 'Happy Healthy Minds' schemes have been dropped.
In the absence of locally-elected ministers and Assembly scrutiny committees there is a lack of transparency over how permanent secretaries are reaching decisions about what they are choosing to cut - and to fund - in their departments.
That, of course, is another outworking of the DUP's refusal to enter power-sharing. This policy becomes only increasingly wrongheaded the longer it continues. It also ignores the vital importance of how cooperation can benefit all our citizens, not only within Northern Ireland but - as Mr Donnelly has demonstrated - between north and south.
