Civil servants in North will have to learn to adjust to new political order

On Tuesday, television viewers were treated to carefully staged pictures of senior officials greeting the newly designated ministers of the Northern Ireland Executive as they arrived in their departments.

It shows how much the civil service has learnt in a year. Does changed behaviour reflect any change in their thinking? When David Trimble arrived in his Stormont office as First Minister Designate in July 1998, there was no welcoming party.

He had no outside phone line or fax machine. The civil service would say he had and did say he had. Indeed, he had access to the most modern communications available. Note the word access. To make an outside call he would have had to go through a secretary. The fax was also in the charge of a civil servant.

It didn't take Mr Trimble long to remedy the position. He knew what he wanted and he got it pretty quickly. No one meant any disrespect to the First Minister Designate. He was simply experiencing at first hand the results of 25 years of civil service government. Since direct rule was imposed in 1972, the powers of councils in the North have been confined to emptying bins, burying the dead and running leisure centres.

For a generation junior officials have had more power than any councillor. Senior officials have enjoyed enormous power because, with few exceptions, ministers sent over from Britain rubberstamped the advice given to them. There were no votes for them in any decisions they took.

On the contrary, they could lose votes in their British constituencies by becoming too involved in Irish affairs and they got no thanks from anyone in the North for interfering too much. On planning issues and appointments to public bodies they simply took it as read that their officials knew best. After all transient ministers didn't know the difference between Maghera and Maghery and usually couldn't pronounce either.

Presented with a list of names for potential membership of a quango they wouldn't recognise anyone on it. So whom did the officials recommend? The answer is a disproportionate number of liberal unionists and supporters of the Alliance Party which with 6 per cent of the vote at best, often ended up with the plum posts in public bodies.

Given the make-up of the Northern state, it is only natural that unionist thinking predominates in the civil service, particularly in the higher echelons. After all, 50 per cent of unionists voted against the Belfast Agreement.

The best recent evidence for hostility to change is the spate of official leaks directed against Mo Mowlam as soon as she took office in 1997. The most dangerous was the so-called gameplan for Garvaghy Road leaked in July 1997 implying that Dr Mowlam had misled the residents into believing there would be no march while at the same time planning one.

The unionist officials who leaked the documents in 1997 and 1998 are still there, no doubt confirmed in their political views. For all these reasons, many nationalists would say the civil service is an organisation in as much need of radical reform as the RUC.

The minister in charge, the SDLP's Mark Durkan, has his work cut out. How long will the new ministers take to change official culture? Already, they've slipped behind. The parties allowed the civil service to appoint permanent secretaries to the four new departments last year.

In a tense invisible struggle other senior officials have been sliding quietly into strategic positions in the departments. The new Executive has had no say in any of this even though the ministers are heads of department and by rights ought to have had some role in the structure and composition of their offices.

Aside from the overwhelmingly unionist ethos of the civil service, new ministers will have to contend with the age-old struggle between politicians elected to implement party policies and officials unhappy with the import of those policies.

In the North, this contest will be sharpened by habits developed over decades of experience by the civil service. It isn't simply unwillingness to implement certain policies. Civil servants in the North have been used to taking decisions and not needing to tell ministers partly because the minister, usually English, had no view on the matter.

The labyrinthine committee system in the new Assembly will add to the complications and scope for official dissimulation. For a start, it offers the opportunity to play off the chairman of the committee against the minister whose work the committee scrutinises. Most money is on the Agriculture committee to provide the best entertainment with the Minister, Brid Rodgers, pitted against the committee chairman, the Rev Ian Paisley.

Within their own departments the new ministers have no idea what they have a right to know and, despite attending "minister school" in seminars organised for Assembly members since 1998, there is no substitute for experience and no minister has any.

It is generally accepted a minister needs six months to learn the ropes. The first six months in the North could be crucial in setting the tone of the administration. How much freedom will the Northern Ireland Office allow them?

Lest it be forgotten, the NIO hasn't gone away. The Northern Secretary, Peter Mandelson, remains responsible to the British cabinet for the North. He will negotiate the bloc grant for the North in the British cabinet and the NIO's permanent secretary, Joe Pillings, will oversee its allocation to the Executive.

The NIO, stuffed with local pro-union officials, will still run security, policing, courts and non-devolved powers as well as dealing with the Government here through the British-Irish Council.

All that said, observers expect rapid change. Take quangos. With an amazing 1,500 posts for David Trimble and Seamus Mallon alone to allocate, the ministers will instantly recognise the names on lists officials present to them and will be able to ask questions that have never occurred to any English minister.

For the first time in most civil servants' careers, they'll be facing a minister whose decisions carry personal electoral consequences. Such a person is an awesome sight.

Brian Feeney is a columnist with the Irish News