Northern Ireland misses a deadline to fix its budget crisis

HILLSBOROUGH, Northern Ireland — Northern Ireland’s budgetary crisis reached an embarrassing milestone Friday with no agreement on future spending — and increasingly bitter arguments over who’s to blame. The U.K. region’s cross-community government of British unionists and Irish nationalists was supposed to have agreed a multi-year budget by January. But after months of bickering, a legal deadline passed Friday that triggers an automatic cap restricting Stormont’s 2026-27 spending to 5 percent below last year’s expenditures — billions below what local leaders insist they need to keep hospitals, schools and other critical services running. Those leaders delivered a chorus of financial demands during their first meetings Friday with the newly appointed secretary of state, Chris Bryant, a Northern Ireland novice who last week replaced the previous seasoned officeholder, Hilary Benn, as part of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s clear-out of Keir Starmer loyalists. Bryant, a former Anglican priest who’s never held a Cabinet post before, held his first press conference as Northern Ireland secretary shortly before meeting delegations from the region’s two main government parties, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists. Bryant emphasized that the U.K. government expects Stormont to get more bang for its buck by reforming the delivery of local services, most crucially hospital care, where Northern Ireland suffers the worst waiting lists in the entire National Health Service. “Look, we need to get to a budget,” Bryant said. “And I understand the financial pressures. I know everybody expects me to come with a checkbook. I’m actually coming with a checklist of things that I want to get sorted.” Sinn Féin, which holds the key finance and economy ministries, has shied from taking any significant decisions on raising local taxes—not that the DUP wouldn’t immediately veto such moves. Nothing much can happen in Northern Ireland’s system of cross-community government unless the largest parties on each side of the divide can agree. The two parties blame each other for delivering so little and agree that it’s up to the U.K. Treasury to break the budgetary impasse by providing them much more annually to spend. An independent budgetary watchdog, the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, recently concluded that the region wasn’t being subsidized by English taxpayers to the same levels as in Scotland and Wales — and if it was, Northern Ireland could gain an extra £1 billion to £3.5 billion annually. While few expect the Burnham administration to come anywhere close to that, both sides in Belfast do expect Bryant to take charge of key budget decisions — which is what his predecessors did when the Northern Ireland Executive collapsed in 2017 from a Sinn Féin walkout, and again in 2022 from a Democratic Unionist walkout. Power-sharing was the central goal of Northern Ireland’s peace accord of 1998, which largely ended a three-decade conflict that claimed nearly 3,700 lives. But Stormont’s mandatory coalition of former enemies has proved unstable and ineffective, particularly in the past decade. A multi-year budget — considered essential for driving reforms, including to Northern Ireland’s U.K.-low local rates of tax — hasn’t been agreed since 2011. Both Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists are suffering in the most recent opinion polls — in the DUP’s case, partly because its former leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, in June was convicted of sexually assaulting two girls. Stormont’s dysfunction is raising the risk that Sinn Féin or the DUP could unilaterally withdraw from government again, forcing its shutdown, ahead of the next Northern Ireland Assembly elections in May 2027. Leaving their meeting with Bryant, a former Sinn Féin finance minister, Conor Murphy, stressed that his Irish republican party was growing increasingly frustrated by the DUP. Flanked by current Finance Minister John O’Dowd and Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald, Murphy accused the DUP of lacking