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Stormance finances have been in the spotlight again this week

as the monitoring round divvied up the executive's unspent cash

between its big spending departments.

The bad news was there wasn't quite as much to go around

as had been initially expected,

but the good

news was that pay settlements for health service staff, police officers and teachers could be

accommodated and some of the pain like the proverbial can was kicked down the road to next

year when discussions about projected shortfalls and possible overspends will no doubt start

all over again.

I'm Mark Carruthers in this edition of Red Lines.

We're talking about the numbers, of course,

but we're also asking why it's always such a struggle to get them to add up.

And with me, to consider if politics too often manages to get in the way of good decision-making or three experts who promise not to pull any punches in the next half-hour. Professor Judy Carson from Ulster University's Strategic Policy Unit, Sir David Sterling, who's a former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, and Jane McCormack are political correspondent. Welcome to you all. Jane, the allocations have been made earlier in the week. Are executive ministers broadly happy?

Broadly. I don't think it was the Christmas bonanza, but nobody expected that it was going to be the sense that I got yesterday.

If you can say that there was a winner from a monitoring round, which is an unusual way to look at it, but Naomi Long, Justice Minister, obviously got what she asked for. She's sorting out the award for PSNI staff. She's also got the money for the first year of her recruitment plan, the recovery plan for the police services. So that's a big tick in her book. She was like the cat who got the cream yesterday. The health minister, McNus, but obviously he's going to be able to make that award to health care workers. He didn't get the sum of money that he had maybe anticipated or hoped for. But when he came out yesterday to speak to us, he didn't want to hit Michelle O'Neill at all. Because if you remember back in October, she'd said, look, we are, we found 100 million and of course we know health is only getting shy of 70 million to address that. So he's still having to overspend, but he doesn't want to make a big deal of it. He's just got to get on and deliver this payoff for now. I suppose Paul Given is the one minister we didn't hear from yesterday. And given that we know he's not shy of finding a microphone or two, he obviously still hasn't made the teacher pay offer for this year. There is the option he's going to have to overspend as well because he didn't get all that he asked for. Yeah, there is a bizarre little twist here, isn't there? And that Mike Nesbitt is carrying over the biggest deficit into next year. But he and John O'Dowd seem to be good mates at the moment. I spoke to somebody this morning who would be fairly close to Mike Nesbitt who said to me, sometimes there's a bit of a love in, it seems, between Mike Nesbid and John O'Dowd, since Nesbitt took over from Robin Swan as health minister, he's kind of made it his mission to be on very good terms with John O'Dard, because John O'Dard, in a sense, even though there's a four-party executive, he does control the purse strings. I think it's probably a good thing if you're a minister in the executive to have a good relationship with the finance minister. And so they seem to be, even though there's an overspend, he knows he's got agreement from

the executive to reach into next year.

If he can't sort it out this year, there's no controversy there.

Yeah, but the weird thing is that we saw a statement yesterday from Steve Aiken, who is Mike

Nesbitt's Ulster unionist colleague who speaks on the economy,

absolutely getting stuck in for the decision and saying what a bad monitoring round it was.

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