Devolved: The Satirical Comedy Inside Stormont's Dysfunction

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Channel 4’s proposed new satirical comedy Devolved, set inside the corridors of Stormont, is being pitched as a bold, absurd take on the dysfunction of Northern Ireland’s devolved government.

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Written by Séamas O’Reilly and developed with Brian J. Falconer at Out of Orbit, Devolved is one of three new half-hour scripts commissioned through Channel 4 and Northern Ireland Screen’s Comedy Lab.

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The show offers, in their words, “an absurd glimpse at the dysfunction and disharmony of Stormont”. It is a workplace comedy “about people who hate work and rarely govern.” If it sounds like satire, it’s only because we’ve been living through the farce for years.

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For too long, Stormont has been both a national embarrassment and an international curiosity. Power-sharing has broken down so often that it now feels like the default setting.

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If anything, Devolved faces the creative challenge of parodying a system that is already parodying itself. It’s not the first attempt to mine the political mess for laughs.

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Now, the mood has shifted. The reverence has curdled into cynicism. Disillusionment is rampant. People are tired of being told to be patient with a system that seems fundamentally allergic to progress.

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Devolved, in that context, arrives not as a cheeky experiment but as an act of cultural commentary. It is set to be a satire sharpened by frustration, and make no mistake, frustration is the dominant political mood in Northern Ireland today.

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Stormont has become a place of contradictions. It is bloated but ineffective, loud but incoherent, expensive yet unproductive.

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So yes, it’s funny but it’s also tragic. A comedy about a government that doesn’t govern is easy to pitch because it’s already our lived experience. But it’s worth asking what that says about the state of our politics.