Serious financial mismanagement is not a phrase any organisation would want to be associated with, but the Executive found itself in that position this week.

The Northern Ireland Fiscal Council was publishing an assessment of Finance Minister John O’Dowd’s proposed three-year budget, and it made for predictably depressing reading.

Stormont departments are on course to overspend this year by almost £460 million.

London has agreed to provide a “de facto bail-out” of £400m to keep public services afloat, but this must be repaid over three years.

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The danger, council chairman Sir Robert Chote highlighted, is that this normalises what the Treasury would define as “serious financial mismanagement” by failing to stick to budgets, and the Executive then feels less pressure to deal with the underlying causes of its overspending.

This brings us back to familiar conversations about the ‘hard choices’ successive power-sharing governments seem incapable of making if they are to balance the books.

That Stormont would like more money, and could find ways to spend it, is in no doubt.

To take one example this week, infrastructure minister Liz Kimmins, facing questions from MLAs, blamed the shocking number of potholes on our roads on under-investment in the network over many years.

The assembly’s Public Accounts Committee has also published a report on homelessness which highlights the spiralling bill for temporary accommodation, rising from £7.6m in 2018/19 to more than £40m last year.

It claimed a short-term, reactive approach was driving the crisis and questioned a lack of targets for building new social homes.

House-building, of course, is being severely hampered by under-investment in the wastewater system.

And the very serious impacts of budget constraints in our health and education systems have been highlighted time and again.

The current Executive has been under pressure to produce a multi-year budget, which would give departments what Mr O’Dowd described as “the certainty they need for long-term planning and create the conditions to drive transformational change”.

Disgracefully, it has been 15 years since an administration at Stormont agreed such a plan.

A draft budget was put out for consultation by the finance minister recently, but without sign-off around the Executive table. With an election due next year, there seems little prospect of progress any time soon.

That about sums up the failure of Stormont to act collectively in the public interest, with parties seemingly content to operate in silos and allow problems to fester for years, in the hope the British government will step in to bail it out.

Promises of delivery have long rung hollow and without a dramatically different approach, politicians should not be surprised if public patience with our devolved structures, like the money tap from London, one day runs out.

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