IF you want to judge the values of any society, you could do worse than ask how well it funds its libraries.
Each a Republic of Letters, libraries play a unique part in building up informed and educated communities – their role as working class universities is as vital today as ever before.
In particular, they are manna from heaven for newcomers who struggle to find a snug and safe place to study — and access the internet. I know of one refugee family who used to turn off the heat in all their rooms in the winter, except for the bedroom in which the children did their homework. Suffice to say, they got good value from their winter coats.
In many growing cities, libraries are bustling hubs of humanity and learning — as long as the city fathers and mothers continue to fund the adequate opening hours and programmes of activity which attract in new readers and patrons. As a teen, I visited Andersonstown Library in Slievegallion weekly, picking up excellent biographies of Che Guevara, Colonel Grivas and other heroes of we Andytown misfits. And though the streets outside were on fire, the library was an oasis of calm.
So how have we been faring in our elevation of libraries. Not so good, I'm afraid. When Libraries NI was set up in 2009, its budget was £39m. In 2023-2024, that budget had dropped to a miserly £29m. Of course, that's only half the story. For, factoring in inflation, £39m today would be the equivalent of £62.5m (according to the Bank of England inflation calculator). Let me give that it's own line and in bold type too:
In real terms, our budget for library services has dropped from £62.5m to £29m.
Of course, in that period, we endured ten years of Tory austerity, midwifed by the UUP. After a very brief boost to budgets during COVID, we are now, ah, labouring, under the Labour Party austerity cosh.
There is enough blame to dole out on this one as neither the parties who held the Communities' portfolio or the other parties around the Executive table cried 'halt'. All will complain that the money pipe from London was reduced to a trickle in those same years – and with some justification too.
The bad news: things are about to get worse here. In pursuit of his jingoistic Make Britain Great Again campaign, the British PM is about to prioritise 'defence' spending. Budgets for defence, says the FT, will rise from 3.8 per cent of UK income to 4.1 per cent by 2027 and to five per cent by 2035.
To put that in context: In 23-24, the UK budget was £1.189 trillion - 1.3 per cent (the extra defence spend by 2027) of that is an additional £15.5bn per annum on blowy-up stuff. (And to put that in even more context, £15.5bn is about the entire sum the NI Executive spends each year on services.)
To get things off with a bang, Starmer has ordered up 12 fighter jets from President Donald Trump at just under £100m each.
The real rub is that all this additional spending is of zero benefit to we mere peasants in the North. If our London overlords has decided to spend £15.5bn its troubled high speed rail system, a consequential bonus payment of about £450m would have flowed into our coffers under the existing 'Barnett' system. Sadly, defence expenditure by London is seen – hilarious as this may sound – as benefitting all the citizens of this disunited kingdom. To put it another way, our ever-lengthening hospital waiting lists are the price we pay for that Red Arrows flyover.
A new, costly chapter is opening in British politics. And we're footing the bill.
