{"id":63281,"date":"2026-10-22T17:34:58","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/stormont-budget-party-leaders-give-differing-assessments-on-talks\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T17:34:58","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:34:58","slug":"stormont-budget-party-leaders-give-differing-assessments-on-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/stormont-budget-party-leaders-give-differing-assessments-on-talks\/","title":{"rendered":"Stormont budget: Party leaders give differing assessments on talks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b>Northern Ireland&#8217;s two largest political parties have given differing assessments of talks with the secretary of state over Stormont&#8217;s budget deadlock.<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Following an in-person meeting with Sir Chris Bryant, Sinn F\u00e9in leader Mary Lou McDonald accused the government of &#8220;attempting to shortchange&#8221; people in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Gavin Robinson described talks with the NI secretary as &#8220;uncharacteristically&#8221; constructive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sir Chris, who has insisted there is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c6je5wqgwxpgo\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\">no more money available<\/a> beyond the \u00a31.5bn the government has already offered, has accused executive ministers of being financially &#8220;irresponsible&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The executive has maintained it cannot balance its books without more support from London. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The current package would be split into three tranches with \u00a3525m available this year, but the Stormont parties said that still falls short of what they require.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Without an agreed budget, public sector workers in Northern Ireland cannot receive long-awaited pay awards that they are entitled to, in line with their counterparts in other parts of the UK.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq98znln7l8po?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Northern Ireland&#8217;s two largest political parties have given differing assessments of talks with the secretary of state over Stormont&#8217;s budget deadlock. Following an in-person meeting with Sir Chris Bryant, Sinn F\u00e9in leader Mary Lou McDonald accused the government of &#8220;attempting to shortchange&#8221; people in Northern Ireland. But Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Gavin Robinson described [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[17192,2031,17191,1138,511,2097,2468,220],"class_list":["post-63281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-n-ireland","tag-assessments","tag-budget","tag-differing","tag-give","tag-leaders","tag-party","tag-stormont","tag-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63283,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63281\/revisions\/63283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}