CHANCELLOR George Osborne has tied the devolution of corporation tax to success at Stormont's five-party talks. But what is his definition of 'success'? Osborne said he wanted proof the executive can "manage the financial implications", so he is not particularly interested in the original talks issues of flags, parading and the past, or the reform of Stormont's structures added to the agenda in September. The overall finances of the executive's budget for next year were agreed separately in October, to meet another Osborne condition on a loan. That just leaves welfare reform, creating a link between benefit cuts and business tax cuts that will hardly motivate 'anti-austerity' Sinn Fein. The pressure is thus very much on unionists to give ground on just about everything else. It did not take long for the toilet paper to come back up the bowl.
*** ONE of the most striking insights to emerge so far from the hyponatraemia inquiry into the deaths of five children in hospitals across Northern Ireland is how health trusts have somehow acquired the legal culture of corporations in aggressively defending their 'reputations'. The same attitude has been apparent in the South Eastern Trust following its defeat at an employment tribunal. Despite a litany of sectarian incidents against a Catholic nurse at the Ulster Hospital by staff and management, including being offered "Drumcree chicken" and having flags and bunting put up in a corridor, the trust has brushed off the tribunal's findings with the words: "[we] refute that there is a culture of toleration of sectarian behaviour in any of our hospitals". Why are we paying a public body to behave as if it is protecting a private interest?
*** GERRY Adams has told a public meeting in north Belfast that there is no place in the republican movement for "anyone who expresses misogynist views". This is presumably bad news for Sinn Féin members who reposted anonymous claims that Máiría Cahill wanted to be raped.
n n n LAST week a report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that for the first time in history, pensioners have higher incomes than the working population and "as a group have stopped being poor". This week and next week, Radio Ulster is "working in partnership" with Age NI on a Christmas appeal that includes despatching one "brave" reporter to live on the allegedly inadequate state pension. Age NI is a lobby group that describes its mission as to "influence our decision-makers". Is a BBC partnership appropriate?
*** THERE were gritted teeth in the Cathedral Quarter as Sinn Féin sports and hobbies minister Carál Ní Chuilín opened a new Ulster-Scots Agency 'hub and visitor's centre', on which her cash-strapped department has splurged £400,000. Alas for the arty crowd, everyone has colluded for years with the Ulster-Scots project in the belief that it helped lever up funding all round. Now that the good times are over and the mock-Jocks are still demanding their cut, nobody wants to be first to call it out as a load of nonsense.
*** Labour MP Maria Eagle has led a furious revolt at the shadow cabinet over plans in the cross-party Smith Report to devolve abortion law to Scotland. According to newspaper reports, there was "panic" at the prospect of Scottish Catholic influence, with Eagle banging the table and denouncing "a bunch of men deciding on women's rights".
She was parliamentary private secretary in 1999 when her government handed abortion powers to Stormont and a Northern Ireland Office minister from 2006 to 2007, during which abortion cropped up repeatedly in the bill of rights debate.
*** DISCUSSING his plans for minimum alcohol pricing, the DUP's Jim Wells told Radio Ulster than drinking causes "psoriasis". He presumably meant cirrhosis.
Nobody expects our health minister to be a medical expert but should he not know the difference between a bad rash and organ failure?
*** IN 2009, the 'Arc 21' waste incinerator planned by 11 eastern councils for Belfast's north foreshore was scuppered at the last minute after Belfast councillors from all parties took cold feet at their own proposal.
However, the need for the incinerator remained so the Arc 21 plan resurfaced last year, this time in Mallusk. Following all-party objections from Newtownabbey council, all parties at Stormont are now backing an alternative proposal in which waste from the Arc 21 councils will be burned in a private incinerator planned by Bombardier just across Victoria Channel from the original north foreshore site.
In other words, a Belfast harbour incinerator is fine once circumstances have distanced politicians from direct responsibility for building it. Rarely has the spineless nimbyism of our elected representatives been so perfectly illustrated. newton@irishnews.com