IN PERIODS of budgetary retrenchment like the present it is difficult to keep a sense of proportion between larger cuts in expenditure and smaller ones which may add up to have a more damaging overall effect. Such is the case with two cost-cutting measures publicised this week concerning our relations with Northern Ireland and Wales. Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe announced he has decided to suspend funding of an autism assessment and therapy centre in Middletown close to the Border in Co Armagh.
As he sees it, this is a realistic decision given that his capital expenditure budget has been cut by €70 million this year. The centre, founded in 2002, is part of a much wider North-South co-operative programme under the Belfast Agreement. This particular project will, if and when completed, enable 20 families and their children to receive treatment.
As was reported in these pages yesterday, the Government has also decided to close the Irish Consulate General in Cardiff because of budgetary difficulties. Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin has written to the first minister of the Welsh National Assembly, Rhodri Morgan, about the decision, regretting it and assuring him it does not represent any downgrading of the Government’s commitment to Wales and its devolved administration. Representative work there will continue to be done by the Irish Embassy in London.
In themselves these are small cuts. But together they raise a disturbing possibility that the architecture of the Belfast Agreement might be affected by budgetary retrenchment. That is far from the intention of such individual decisions, but alongside one another they can look differently. The North-South and British-Irish parts of the agreement are carefully constructed to balance each other; and while their structures must respond to changing circumstances, care should be taken not to upset that balance unintentionally. The coincidence of these cuts suggests this could happen more easily than anticipated under further financial pressure.
The North-South dimension of our policy-making becomes all the more important during this economic crisis, when common action can multiply the benefits of co-operation agreed over the last 11 years. And the changing fortunes of Britain’s devolution experiment, in which the prospect of Scottish independence has sharply receded as the crisis gets worse, by no means diminishes the need to maintain close relations between Ireland and Scotland. The Cardiff decision is regrettable and should not set a precedent for Edinburgh.