Public's verdict on Stormont politicians: You've hit rock bottom

The public has delivered a damning verdict on our politicians at Stormont - you've hit rock bottom.

The latest results of a major Belfast Telegraph poll have revealed that fewer than one in six people believes Stormont is doing a better job than direct rule from Westminster.

The poll results have prompted further calls for political reform.

This is a dismal performance. Last year a quarter of people surveyed thought that our 108-member Assembly was doing a better job than the team of direct rule ministers who are likely to replace it if it collapses.

With financial crisis looming at the Executive, the stark poll findings reveal that the public appetite for a new process to restore our broken political system is growing.

Former chief executive of the Community Relations Council Dr Duncan Morrow said Stormont needed "to rise above party" and put the "common good" at the core.

The senior politics lecturer at the University of Ulster and former Alliance candidate said: "There are two things that need to happen. One, in a mandatory coalition all parties need to prioritise agreeing the Programme for Government, which is based on recognition that this is the only way it works – getting on."

He continued: "The second thing is that some of the structural elements need to be addressed, like the petitions of concern, possibly even trying to find an alternative to everyone having to have consensus across the board.

"These need to be urgently addressed because, as it stands, the danger is that politics is being brought in to disrepute.

"Their responsibilities now are bigger than party."

When Don't Knows (DKs) were excluded, Stormont's satisfaction rating came out at minus 46 – this is the sort of score you expect a government to have before it collapses or a leader faces serious criminal charges.

By comparison, even in the depth of the recession, the British Government satisfaction seldom went below -35.

To compare another devolved institution, the Scottish Government normally has a score of around +12.

Further reading:

We asked our sample of 1,089 people "compared to direct rule from Westminster, how do you rate the performance of the Northern Ireland Assembly?" on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 Excellent and 5 Very Bad.

The satisfaction rating is worked out by taking the difference between the negative and positive scores. That gives an overall picture and excludes DKs from the calculation.

Figures from this point on will include DKs for greater precision. On this measure only 1.5% of people, well below the margin of error (2.9%), rated Stormont's performance excellent, and 14.6% considered it good.

That was a total 16.1% who rated the Assembly positively. It is dwarfed by the 55.8% who rated it negatively, of whom 32.4% thought it was bad and 23.4% gave it the lowest score available. The rest were either neutral (16.7%) or didn't know (13.7%).

Protestants scored the Assembly even more negatively than Catholics.

Not a single Protestant surveyed said the Assembly was performing very well, and only 6.6% thought it was performing well. By comparison, more than a fifth of Catholics (22.4%) rated the Assembly positively and 18.8% were neutral as compared to 5.8% of Protestants.

Close to two-thirds of Protestants rated it bad (31.8%) or very bad, which was the most common opinion espoused by 33.8% of Protestants surveyed. In contrast nearly half of Catholics (48.6%) still rated Stormont negatively, but of these only one in 10 (9.8%) gave it the lowest available score.

One possible explanation may be that members of the Protestant and unionist community feel more drawn to direct rule from Britain than those Catholics who are of a nationalist outlook.

Another factor in the more negative rating from Protestants may be the sense of alienation from Stormont felt by some loyalists who say they are losing a cultural war on issues like the display of the Union flag.

In terms of age groups, the 18-24 age range gave Stormont a worse score than their elders.

Further reading:

Belfast Telegraph