Little-Pengelly 'confident' £100m will be found for health worker pay

There is "reason to be confident" that Stormont's health minister will find £100m to meet the cost of pay awards for frontline health staff this year, Emma Little-Pengelly has said.

On Thursday, the executive announced £100m to go towards this year's uplift - half of what Health Minister Mike Nesbitt estimated it will cost.

Nesbitt said he is still working to find the remainder and is in negotiations with health unions, who have begun balloting members for strike action because of the ongoing delay.

The executive also allocated £37m to the Department of Education for pay awards for teachers and £6.7m to the Department of Justice for police officers.

Ministers in those departments also needing to find the remaining half of the funding required from their budgets.

On Friday, Little-Pengelly said she recognised that finding the money was always going to be difficult, but that ministers were in a "much better position" now to be able to resolve the issue.

O'Neill was asked to clear up confusion caused by Thursday's announcement, after she said Nesbitt had "found" the remaining £100m needed for health worker pay awards - something the health minister later disputed.

She said the executive now needed to "create space" to allow conversations over the funding to continue, adding that she hoped there would be a positive outcome over the "next couple of days".

Friday's meeting of ministers at the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), which meets several times a year to allow discussions on cross border co-operation came one week away from polls opening for the Irish presidential election.

Heather Humphreys is representing the Fine Gael party, which is part of the country's coalition government. She is running against independent candidate Catherine Connolly, who has been endorsed by Sinn Féin and other left-leaning parties.

Asked about calls for voting rights in the election to be extended to Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, the deputy first minister - who is also in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) - rejected them, adding: "Northern Ireland has a head of state".

"That head of state reflects the political reality - it's the difference between a political reality and a political aspiration and we need to be very careful not to overstep into that mark which is around the delicate equilibrium of the Good Friday Agreement," she added.

O'Neill - who is Sinn Fein's vice-president - said it was a "huge democratic deficit" that voting rights have not yet been extended.

She added: "We shouldn't have another presidential election where we're left out."

It was set up under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and involves ministers from Dublin and Stormont working together on "matters of mutual interest".

The council covers six areas of co-operation: agriculture, education, environment, health, tourism and transport.

Common policies and approaches are agreed, but implemented separately in each jurisdiction.

It only meets when power-sharing at Stormont is functioning as it requires ministers from both areas to meet regularly.