evidence: MÓM: I think there’s always two aspects to this, certainly in this devolved set-up that we have. One was to take the ministry and to use it to the maximum benefit of all the people, but particularly to fulfil the party manifesto. Sinn Féin, being a party of the left, obviously wanted as much support for people who were at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. We wanted to introduce things such as the Social Value Act onto procurement, which I was responsible for, to £2 billion a year. We wanted to end zero-hour contracts. We wanted to make sure that we had a better gender balance in our central procurement directorate, which when I went in was, believe it or not, 14 men. So yes, you take all the Sinn Féin touchpoints, touchstones, I suppose, and say: "Look, we have to deliver on those, and the party expects that." For example, there was a very important project to build the first proper road from Belfast to Derry since partition. Martin McGuinness [deputy first minister] said: "I don’t care what you do, but you need to make sure that I have the billion pounds to do that." [...] And doing that probably didn’t help me balance the books or deliver extra money for the people, but it entirely changed the perception of what the finance minister was doing, and how people regarded the finance minister, and the Sinn Féin finance minister, and that goes back to my original priorities.