{"id":366387,"date":"2026-01-12T16:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T16:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/366387\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T16:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T16:18:08","slug":"michelle-oneill-urges-ministers-to-agree-multi-year-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/366387\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelle O&#8217;Neill urges ministers to agree multi-year budget"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Under the draft budget for 2026\/27, only four departments would see a mild increase in their budgets &#8211; education, health, justice and infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, the figures currently do not reflect any potential overspend by departments for this year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Health Minister Mike Nesbitt had previously said he was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cy0kdkpzz22o\" class=\"ssrcss-f6h2dj-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">on course to bust his budget by up to \u00a3100m to meet the cost of pay awards for healthcare worker<\/a>s this year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Education Minister Paul Givan has also made clear staffing and teacher pay costs mean he will struggle to balance his budget for this year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Alliance leader and Stormont Justice Minister Naomi Long said &#8220;toxicity&#8221; between the parties needs to stop in order to focus on delivery.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We don&#8217;t have forever in this mandate, we&#8217;ve got to inject pace into this and we won&#8217;t do that by taking each other on in the chamber week by week,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;My department I know will suffer next year&#8230; we have got to deliver within our means.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Under the draft budget for 2026\/27, only four departments would see a mild increase in their budgets &#8211;&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-366387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}