Imagine Belfast is not the issue. Please, Reimagine Stormont.

I went to an event called Clashing Symbols hosted by the Office of Identity and Cultural Expression as part of the Imagine Belfast week of debates and discussions. This new office was created under the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland ) Act 2022. Its role is to promote cultural pluralism, respect diversity, and encourage reconciliation. Cultural pluralism is a euphemism for promoting and encouraging identity politics where victimhood and your lived experience supersede shared values and collective experiences. As one of the commissioners said, is this just handing on the baggage of our recent history to the next generation? The language element of this new body’s role, according to the latest census, is for 2.4% of the population who can speak Irish and even less who use it on a daily basis, and 1.14% who can speak Ulster Scots.

The Director, Katy Radford, is apparently an expert on social inclusion, but heads up an office that encourages crass identity politics. This new office looks like her previous role as a member of Stormont’s Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition, but in drag. To remind the new director of Judith Maxwell’s definition of social inclusion:” Social inclusion involves building shared values and communities of interpretation, reducing disparities in wealth and income and generally enabling people to have a sense that they are engaged in a common enterprise, facing shared challenges, and they are a member of the same community”.

This new office will cost £25.0 million over 5 years, including each of the three commissioners, costing us the taxpayer £100k a year each. Is this value for money or even needed, but it is the price we all pay for a dysfunctional mandatory coalition. Just to put this into context, £25.0 million is equivalent to 3,000 hip replacements with a 4-year waiting time, or 300,000 GP appointments. Professor  Radford had nothing to say about our apartheid education, which is a damming indictment on our society and is a stumbling block to building social cohesion and building a shared future. The evening event was a romper room for adults, and it seems this is the best we can expect from the Office of Identity and Cultural Expression, a name that would not look out of place in Orwell’s 1984. I would advise Katy to read Ash Sarkar’s book, Minority Rule. On top of this, we have the Community Relations Council, another quango on the reconciliation industry bandwagon, costing £1.25 million annually, with outcomes and impact not measured. The reconciliation industry has cost us hundreds of millions, with not one single measurable outcome.

 I had planned to go to another event called Checks and Balances: The role of opposition in the UK and Ireland. Then I realised that on the panel were a bunch of politicians, who could be classified at best, as uninspiring; they were Matthew O’Toole, SDLP MLA, who makes a virtue out of electoral and political failure( 9% of the vote in 2022 resulting in the party losing its right to nominate a minister to the executive) and then rebranded it as going into “opposition”. This failure was sold as a strategic success in a Kamal Harris-type word salad. Then there is John McCallister, who was part of the quite frankly comical and short-lived NI 21 endeavour with Basil McCrea. They tried to sell and ultimately failed to sell a pro-union light vision for the province, underpinned by a policy-light manifesto. Then, there is Stephen Farry, clearly a nice man whose political career that does not have a single highlight. He was installed at the University of Ulster, wait for it, as the Professor of Strategic Policy in Practicein the Strategic Policy Unit. We in Northern Ireland have 20 strategic policy units between central, local government and academic institutions, not to mention so-called think tanks like Pivotal and Ireland’s Future. If high-quality future-facing output was the goal, “nul points”

 The John and Pat Hume Foundation, which was hosting the event, seems to act as a crutch for, sadly, a party that could hardly be described as social democratic, whose appeal is to a conservative age group that is sadly diminishing. They lack vision and policy ideas in a rapidly changing world, and today’s leaders of the SDLP can only be seen as political midgets crouching on the shoulders of giants like John Hume, Seamus Mallon, and  Brid Rodgers. In addition, the Success by Design report by the SDLP’s New Ireland Commission is Starmer-esque waffle with nothing about how any of their suggestions will be funded. They trailed out an uncosted pamphlet with the usual MBA BS vocabulary, using words like strategic, strategy, reform, empower, convergence, establish, transition, commission, subvention,  growth corridors, etc., etc., etc., quite frankly, the report was a waste of trees. Finally, the SDLP, who along with others, created the Belfast Agreement, must now recognise that the current oxymoronic “mandatory coalition framework “ is just not fit for purpose in dealing with the challenges facing our community, let alone a vision and policy agenda for the coming generations. I decided to give the event a “bye ball” because of the time wasted; I would never get back again.

Suneil Sharma

2nd April 2026

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