I was joined in this episode of Northern Slant Hosts by Matthew O’Toole MLA. Matthew has previously been a journalist and commentator, and also worked at the Treasury and 10 Downing Street. He returned to Northern Ireland in 2020 to take up the position of MLA for South Belfast, replacing Claire Hanna, who had won the Westminster seat at the 2019 General Election. 

I spoke to Matthew about the new SDLP ‘Make Change Programme’ policy designed to entice young and experienced talent into the civil service.

You can watch our conversation here (and on YouTube), or listen on Spotify if you’re on the go. You can also scroll down for some highlights from our Q&A.

First I asked Matthew about when he first left Northern Ireland, and why.

I went to St Andrew’s University in Scotland in 2001, which is nearly 20 years ago. It is obviously depressing that I’m that old now. I then travelled for a bit, like a lot of people after university, and lived in London for 13 or 14 years.

When you (Matthew) went over to GB, did you think you’d come back? You probably didn’t imagine you’d come back as an MLA at that point.

I didn’t plan to, is the honest answer. I probably had anticipated that I wouldn’t. Nobody can make plans forever.

One of the things I talk about is the rationale for people choosing to leave this place, and trying to remove or at least lessen the push factors. You can never, and should never, try and imply that the pull factor that someone might have to see a different part of the world – Britain and Ireland or further afield – is wrong. I don’t think it’s desirable to stop people wanting to see other places, but we should try to reduce the push factor – the idea that they feel that they have to or desperately want to leave for a particular reason. 

I left 20 years ago and if I was asked then, my probable view was that I wasn’t planning to come back. But I was 18 and more focused on the days and weeks immediately ahead of me, rather than 20 years hence. 

And you returned to Northern Ireland in 2019/20 to become MLA for South Belfast. There are many complaints about the standard of MLAs, the lack of young, professional-level MLAs, and that it can be an easier life and better paid to work elsewhere. What led you to wanting to come back to become an MLA. What led you to the SDLP particularly?

I’ve always been drawn to the politics of the SDLP. It has always tended, for me anyway, to have some of the best answers in terms of the challenges that this part of the world has faced. Very profound challenges we’ve faced around the structure and the underpinning of the state and of society and the history of conflict, unresolved questions in terms of how this jurisdiction was created, and some of the things that flowed out of that, and the violence that was part of this place for so long.

And I suppose, the people who created the SDLP and those who’ve led it: I’ve tended to be drawn to their analysis, not just politically but morally and intellectually.

And not just in relation to the Northern Ireland questions and the Irish question but also in relation to things like being a party which has a constitutional position and analysis of Northern Ireland and the Irish question in the long term. That analysis is grounded in principles of reconciliation. Not in flag waving and identity, but in reconciliation and bringing people together, the politics of the centre-left and the tradition of European social democracy. All of those things are values that I am drawn to, and we’ve been talking a little bit more about them this week with the year’s anniversary of John Hume’s passing. 

In answer to the question of how I ended up doing this, I was living in London and I was asked to put my name forward by Claire Hanna whom I knew, and Colum Eastwood. I had known other people in the party. I didn’t have a long-term plan at any stage to become a politician. I have always been sympathetic to the SDLP and believe it would have been my political home here but I was not engaged in politics here and didn’t have any intention of getting engaged in politics. 

I felt that it was important that I took the responsibility. I had left the civil service and had started writing, shouting, tweeting about Northern Ireland. Some of that was in journalistic form. But I was really profoundly offended by what a hard Brexit meant for the settlement and the position of Northern Ireland. I felt that it was deeply destabilising. I felt very strongly about it. I still do.

Some of that was tied up with my background, the choices I had made, was the sense that an immense trust was being breached. I thought that it was important that – for people who believe in the political process, and who are frustrated about these things – if you are offered the opportunity, you should take the responsibility, and try and effect things in a way that you think is positive.

One of things you’ve brought forward recently is the Make Change Programme. What is the policy in a nutshell?

In a nutshell, it’s a public service programme to stimulate recruitment into the NI civil service, particularly, initially, recruitment of young people. It is designed to answer two broad, connected challenges. One is the issue around the brain drain. There is this push factor, clearly, that nudges lots of people here, both graduates and school leavers, to go to university or pursue their careers elsewhere.

Pivotal did an interesting report on this and is doing more work on educational immigration. As I said earlier, I am in no way down on people leaving per se or on people wanting to live abroad for a while. What I am about is trying to reduce the push factor, not criticise people for feeling the pull to travel or explore the world. 

There is a very long tradition of that from this whole island; we know that there is a real challenge around young people feeling that opportunity lies elsewhere and that their careers lie elsewhere. But also, people who are interested in careers in public service may be interested in politics, but in a policy sense more than a “capital P” political activism sense. They might be interested in working in the civil service in Britain or in Dublin or in the EU or wherever; but while they might see those as attractive opportunities where they can do interesting, challenging things, and try to solve problems, they don’t seem to associate that with a career here in Northern Ireland. 

There is also the challenge around people feeling change happens here too slowly, that it is too difficult to move this society forward. Yes, that is true in terms of the sectarianism question, but also in relation to other policy challenges. Climate change is an obvious one. We know we are a laggard in terms of climate mitigation; it is shocking and it frustrates lots of young people. 

Then there is the other challenge I want to solve, which is that we have a civil service which has lots of real, profound issues. That is not to be down on existing civil servants who have worked really hard to deliver support during COVID. But it is to say that – for example – we have a crisis in age terms. There is no other way of describing it. 

Over 80% of our senior civil service are over the age of 50. You can’t look at that as anything other than a real problem, because within a decade what happens? You have a huge loss of expertise, mass retirement, presumably, of senior leadership, and then either having to develop people really quickly or simply having a massive vacuum at the top. That is critical for a number of reasons. 

Is it intended to work like the Fast Stream in the UK Government? Apart from making the programme available, and the prestige behind that, what are we going to do to entice young people to join, rather than go to GB to do the Fast Steam for the UK Government? Or go into the private sector?

Those are good questions. Firstly, I’m not down on people wanting to leave. I have spent the last 14 years of my life living in London. If someone really wants to live in a really big city, a global city, they’ll have to leave here. They’ll have to leave the island of Ireland, not just NI. There are amazing global opportunities in Dublin as well, in case anyone watching gets offended. But if they do want to live overseas, and live outside their islands, if they want to live in Paris and New York, no scheme to revitalise the NI civil service and get young people into it is going to make Paris or San Francisco a less attractive prospect. Nor should we try. 

There will be a cohort of people who will be attracted to the opportunity to further their career by doing challenging rewarding public service roles here. Those roles should be prestigious. That comes on to the next bit – how would it compare with the Fast Stream in Britain? There was a Fast Stream in NI too, which has basically been discontinued since about 2014. They are at the minute trying to design some kind of new graduate entry system in the Northern Ireland civil service. There is not much clarity around how it is going to work.

I think there is a job to be done in terms of creating an ethos, a brand, a cachet that people feel is exciting and new. I think that is some of what this is about. In one sense, it would be like the Fast Stream in that, in all three strands, on successful completion of the Make Change Programme training – it would be a mix of training and project work, as well as mentoring, leadership and policy training. So once you’ve completed that, which could be two or three years, it enables you – you would have the potential to have fast-tracked opportunities for promotion where you have delivered. 

Of course reform of the civil service would make a real change to delivery and governing NI more effectively, but many of the issues we face, and the blockers to progress are political rather than policy. In previous episodes of NS Hosts, we’ve spoken to guests about bandwidth being taken up dealing with constitutional issues and day-to-day political issues rather than education reform and the crises there, or healthcare reform. We’ve had five independent reports on healthcare reform, and we know what the policy challenges are there, but the political blockers are there as well. We have fantastic universities and businesses. If we work to develop the civil service and reform there, is our underlying blocker political? How do we shift that?

Yes, it is, in many ways. The purpose of this proposal is not to claim that the civil service is the root of all problems, or that this will solve all our problems. This is a solution for particular issues which exist, but there will still be other challenges that exist around our politics and how dysfunctional our politics are, particularly how dysfunctional it is around NI’s two big parties. 

There are multiple interlocking challenges with our politics that relate to our society and some of the unresolved issues that resonate from our history. So part of the challenge with making progress here is that too often, I think, there is a superstructure, of “Oh my God, there are too many problems. Trying to do one is too hard.” 

Dysfunctional politics is not an excuse not to try to improve the civil service.

I actually think that, on some of the other questions you raised, it is important that we have a high-functioning civil service that is able to deal with those challenges too. I am not saying that it is not now, but there are certainly issues, which have been highlighted by significant reports, that we all know about. It is important that we have a high-functioning civil service to help us deal with those challenges. That includes those things like health reform, but it also includes the constitution. 

It’s not credible or democratic to say that people can’t ever debate the constitution, and there is a legitimate debate about the constitution. The point I would make, is that – in a sense – a lot of these bits of improvements are constitution-blind, actually. Having a high-functioning civil service – to the extent that you can improve it – whatever your constitutional aspiration, should work for everyone.

This interview is available as a podcast on Spotify.

More from the ‘Northern Slant Hosts’ series:

  • Ann Watt, Director of the think tank Pivotal.
  • John McCallister, former MLA and Deputy Leader of the UUP, and founding member and Deputy Leader of the political party NI21.
  • Siobhan O’Neill, Professor of Mental Health Sciences at Ulster University and Northern Ireland’s first Mental Health Champion.
  • Conall McDevitt, CEO of Hume Brophy Communications, a public relations firm, and former SDLP MLA for South Belfast.
  • Richard Johnston, Assistant Director of Economic Policy Centre at Ulster University.