Michelle and I are basically the same household now.

It wasn’t just that Arlene Foster said it, spontaneously, in front of the tough crowd of the Executive Office Committee. It was afterwards, when David Blevins from Sky interviewed her and Michelle O’Neill together and they showed up in near-identical outfits, that I really believed it. Years ago, when my flatmate and I would emerge from our rooms ready to go out for the night, only to find that we’d done the same thing, one of us would go and get changed. It wasn’t just that the First and Deputy First Minister really did seem closer to each other (at the appropriate distance) but that in these moments they both seemed closer to the rest of us.

It was a fraught journey to that easy joke, with questions raised about a delayed departure and whether Northern Ireland, with its particular population density and spread, should have started from there. Not even a global pandemic could take the ideological edge off the idea of an all-island approach, and public disagreement along the old political divides threatened to push public health strategy on to the third rails of segregated education and military involvement. 

When the Executive arrived at the Assembly with an agreed coronavirus recovery plan, then, it was the symbolic cue to heave a socially-distanced sigh of relief. It was also testament to the cohort of nearly-new ministers who had stepped up to the huge demands on them. But disagreement in the Assembly exchanges and wider discussion over the lack of dates and detail have been just as significant. The existence of an official opposition is no guarantee of effective scrutiny but where power is shared and the nearly all the representatives belong to one of the governing parties it is even harder to come by. But the plan did meet with constructive challenge on the floor of the Assembly chamber, especially on measures for business recovery and on the interaction between plans for schools to return and the timetable for transfer tests. 

The COVID-19 crisis has shown the increased capacity of parties and individual MLAs to discharge day-to-day constituency responsibilities and take up more strategic initiatives, like Matthew O’Toole’s proposals to support regional, local and community media. Meanwhile, exhausted as they are entitled to be, Northern Ireland’s representative interest groups are match-fit from Brexit and well able to engage with and challenge the Executive on maintaining essential services and supplies to Northern Ireland – and on reconstructing an economy that in recent years has leaned on the kindness of visiting strangers.

The presentation of the recovery plan to the Assembly also showed the increased responsiveness and capacity for empathy of the Executive’s leadership. Arlene Foster’s acknowledgement that the plan was iterative and her promise that the Executive would ‘listen carefully to understand the views and experiences’ of everyone affected by the virus, suggest at least the potential for a for a more open style of government in future. 

As the First and Deputy First Minister have found a way of working together in their political bubble, it has become evident that they are of their people in a way that Boris Johnson’s government is not. Touched as they have been by the same worry, and tragedy, Arlene and Michelle both demonstrably understand that the prospect of an overnight stay with family or friends is more meaningful than the possibility of a foreign holiday, vital though it is for Northern Ireland to maintain its air routes. 

Arlene Foster has seemed content to be seen to diverge from Westminster on this and other points. It’s as though she knows beyond doubt that Johnson cannot be trusted to look out for, never mind look after, Northern Ireland’s interests. In parallel, the mutual antipathy of Sinn Fein and Leo Varadkar has made pointing to Dublin as an exemplar and insisting on alignment less appealing to Michelle O’Neill. 

It would be an acknowledgement too far for either side to concede that Leo Varadkar’s relative pro-Britishness and his advocacy for the Good Friday Agreement in the EU have served Northern Ireland – unionist or nationalist, pro- or anti-Brexit – relatively well. But what they can agree on, if only tacitly, is the debt of gratitude owed to Julian Smith for his part in restoring Stormont and the degree of self-determination that Northern Ireland has now. As Michelle O’Neill told David Blevins, ‘we’re elected to represent the people who send us here and to take up government departments and actually make decisions on their behalf.’

If the Executive can hold it together, the response to COVID-19 could help to foster a sense of identity for Northern Ireland that is compatible with unionism and nationalism without falling back on the kind of Ulster nationalism – based on a mutual interest in preserving the administrative status quo in Northern Ireland and getting the maximum amount of cash out of government in Whitehall – that was corroding government and governance well before the Renewable Heat Initiative was allowed to run wildly out of control.

The confidence that the Executive can take from – ultimately – having met the COVID-19 crisis head on should enable it to be more open to criticism, and improvement, than ever before. Embedded in the recovery plan was its iterative nature, building in flexibility to change and do things better, and Arlene Foster has already said that a process of review and inquiry will follow. The same approach should be taken to reform post-RHI: the Executive should be prepared to work through the hard problems of health and social care services and educational provision, alongside those of inequality and poverty. The Executive also has to take on the sectarian and paramilitary elements that have ignored or even exploited the lockdown to carry on business as usual. 

There will be a legacy of trauma from coronavirus and lockdown, and alleviation of suffering will take more of the empathy and openness that was signalled in the recovery plan. The same approach should be applied to dealing with the past in Northern Ireland – beginning with the pension scheme for victims and survivors of the Troubles, and including a substantive discussion of racism in Northern Ireland that fully engages with the protests and the links with slavery shared by these islands and their industrial cities in particular. The risk of political leaders reacting by regressing to pre-COVID rhetoric is already obvious, but our representatives are more accountable than they were. The most important issue on the doorstep in the Westminster election – the health service – was a Stormont competence, and coronavirus has only intensified the demand for competent government here. Every party has something to prove to keep or win back votes and since the electoral ground shifted, even if it seems now to have happened in a different lifetime, there is all to play – or rather to work – for. 

For a place so often defined by stereotypes (see the Derry Girls-based Culture Lab calculator), Northern Ireland does tend to resist them, cramming into its small space as much contradiction as it does geographical variation. But compassion, creativity and the colourful turn of phrase – even the official ‘we all must do it to get through it’ message sounds peculiarly Northern Irish – have been themes of the lockdown, with traces of them to be found in the First Minister’s unguarded aside.

In my last visit to a shop pre-lockdown, I overheard an exchange between acquaintances that ended with ‘Sure it’s great to bump into you: I probably won’t see you again now until after the apocalypse.’ As we do begin to see each other again, let’s not lose sight of what COVID-19 has taught our political leaders: we’re all basically the same household now.