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With no prospect of a Stormont Executive being formed by the deadline of midnight on Friday 28 October, all ministers will cease to be in post from this date onwards.
It brings to an end the near three-year tenure of Edwin Poots as Agriculture Minister, the last 24 weeks of which have been in a caretaker capacity.
To be fair to Minister Poots, he has done a good job defending the interests of farmers, and has set the direction of travel in a number of important policy areas, including around bovine TB eradication and future support payments to farmers. He leaves behind a positive legacy.
We now return to a situation where senior civil servants are left in control, and while there are many capable people in those positions, they have limited powers, and their natural instinct is to be risk-averse. They can continue to develop policies, but any significant changes are difficult to deliver.
Payments
One outworking of that is the big shakeup of farm payments planned for 2024 – the longer the Stormont Executive remains absent, the more likely this date gets pushed out to 2025 or beyond.
With no Stormont Executive, it also means no committees are sitting and these committees are an important mechanism to scrutinise the work of civil servants. Of course, devolved government in NI has been far from perfect since institutions were established in 1999. But the general apathy for devolution across the wider public is of concern.
Local ministers
From a farming perspective, having local ministers making decisions is important, and much preferable to how it worked before.
While the latest impasse is down to the DUP and its opposition to the NI Protocol, there is also a wider collective failure among politicians to recognise that there are issues with the post-Brexit arrangements that need to be resolved.
Fundamentally, the hard Brexit delivered by the Conservative Party is the reason we are in this mess. It did not need to be this way.
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