Politicians showing terrible failure of leadership, says Oscar winner

Politicians in Northern Ireland have shown a “terrible failure of leadership” and are sending voters a “dangerous” message that democracy does not work, an Oscar-winning actor from the region has said.

An Irish Goodbye star Seamus O’Hara, who has also appeared in television sensation Game Of Thrones, said the lack of a functioning executive gives the “toxic” idea that casting a vote will not matter because the electorate appears “redundant”.

The actor, from Cushendun in Co Antrim, spoke to the PA news agency on the wider political situation as he criticised funding cuts to a domestic abuse charity – a move he branded “in the literalist sense, deadly”.

The Women’s Aid Federation Northern Ireland – for which O’Hara is raffling off a pocket square he wore to the Oscars and a cape worn by his wife to the Vanity Fair after-party – said a chronic lack of funding has been exasperated by cuts to the core grant funding scheme and is stretching resources to the limit.

The organisation has previously said its funding difficulty is being made worse by the lack of a functioning Stormont executive.

The DUP is blocking the devolved institutions in Belfast in a protest against post-Brexit trading arrangements, and the party has insisted it will not return to Stormont until it secures further legislative assurances from the UK Government around sovereignty and trade.

Senior civil servants are currently running public services in the region in the absence of devolution and have estimated that Stormont departments need hundreds of millions of pounds in extra funding to maintain public services at their current level this year.

O’Hara, said the current situation is a “national disgrace”.

He told PA: “There’s a serious lack of accountability. There’s a serious lack of leadership at the moment.”

Acknowledging his position as an artist rather than a politician, he said: “But I do understand the qualitative value in at least pretending to be leading. Have we not learned enough? Can we not learn from our lessons and see that the way forward, the way out of these deadlocks is to sit down at a table and talk and compromise where it can be found. It’s difficult. It’s not meant to be easy, but we’ve learned that that’s what works. And we’ve also learned that that’s what the general population of the country want to happen.”

He described the situation with politicians who have been elected but are not sitting at Stormont as “undemocratic”, adding: “We’re in a place where the politicians aren’t necessarily representing the will of the people in terms of not sitting. They all have mandates, they should be doing their job.”

Asked what it says about politicians’ attitudes to the public, he said it is “simply disrespectful” and “a great abdication”.

He added: “It’s a terrible, terrible failure of leadership in that the lack of leadership is affecting people in their day-to-day lives.”

He said “one of the most toxic aspects of it is that it is consistently reinforcing that the electorate is redundant”.

He said that despite it being a “very important time for people to be out and voting and having their voices heard”, the situation instead “consistently reinforces that your vote won’t matter”.

He added: “I think it’s teaching the electorate that voting isn’t working which is really dangerous because this is how we get ourselves out of messes – the communities talk about it, think about it, and then they vote with their feet and that’s democracy. But, you know, democracy doesn’t work here because at any stage, that mandate could be pulled.”

Suggesting that “now is the time for reassessment” around Northern Ireland’s future, he said he is hopeful mistakes made in the handling of the Brexit referendum can be learned from when it comes to any border poll.

He said: “We lived through Brexit. Whether you agree with it or disagree with it I think everybody at this stage can agree that there should have been more care taken with that referendum in terms of informing the public what they were voting for, and what the outcomes may be. So, you know, we’ve learned from that.”

Before a poll he said he thinks there is “a lot of work to be done” in order to establish “the things that our communities value and how those things can be shared and appreciated, interchangeably between the communities”.

Women’s Aid said it has been moved by the generosity of local designer Sara O’Neill and the team from An Irish Goodbye – which won the Oscar for best live action short film this year – in raffling off two pocket squares and a cape to raise funds for the charity.

The organisation, which said it wanted to be clear that while its resources are stretched it will not turn those in need away, was praised by O’Hara as doing “incredible work”.

He said: “This is a very, very worthy cause for Women’s Aid. It’s a disaster that their funding has been pulled this way.”