Opinion

Playground fallout just usual old hobby horse

THE Newry playground row needs a general solution if the new supercouncils are not to be engulfed from birth in naming and re-naming rows. The equality duty on public authorities should offer a consistent solution but Sinn Féin has proved in Newry that it will treat that Trojan horse like half a pantomime horse. The concept of 'good relations' is also falling out of favour as republicans feel it amounts to a unionist veto. UUP MLA Tom Elliott's private members bill, which would ban naming public places after convicted terrorists, might be expanded by the SDLP to something broader but for now it is asking to be broken. Glorifying terrorism is already a serious offence but this 2006 legislation is never enforced in Northern Ireland because once you started, where would you stop? Perhaps Belfast City Council has already hit on the best approach. Unlike its predecessor Belfast Corporation, it has a long-standing policy of never naming streets after any person, living or dead.

SINN Féin has a south Armagh credibility problem and not just over its definition of "criminal gang". Amid growing political and media claims in the Republic that it is benefiting from border smuggling, the party has been waving around a letter from Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan, responding to a request from Sinn Féin TD Padraig MacLochlainn, which says An Garda Siochana holds no "information or intelligence" on these allegations. However, the commissioner's letter is premised entirely on a 2009 report from the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), the UK government ceasefire monitoring body that Sinn Féin spent a decade denouncing. In 2006, Martin McGuinness famously told a press conference that IMC reports were "bullshit".

STORMONT'S watchdog Public Accounts Committee has accused the Department of Health of wasting tens of millions of pounds a year on prescription medicines by failing to incentivise GPs to use cheaper products, failing to agree a new contract with pharmacists since 2006 and failing to protect the overall system against fraud. This confirms the findings of an Audit Office report last year, and indeed every report going back years and years into Northern Ireland's mysteriously high prescriptions bill. Given that the department knew this report was imminent, why did DUP minister Jim Wells propose prescription charging three weeks ago to raise a sum comparable to the identified waste? It almost looks as if that statement was rushed out before everyone could tell the department to just get its own costs under control.

THE Audit Office has found an IT company was given £1m by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (Deti) for equipment that cost only £22,000. So you might say that at least the oversight system works. However, concern was first raised with Deti by a whistleblower in 2006, with Deti dismissing the complaint. A whistleblower then approached the Audit Office directly in 2008, leading a mere seven years later to this week's report. Such timescales make a mockery of whistleblowing procedures, which require going through all the internal motions before calling the press or the police. So absurd are the delays that it is tempting to suspect delay is the point.

SHAME on TUV leader Jim Allister, who has asked Sinn Féin education minister John O'Dowd if he is "playing the green card" by appointing Sharon O'Connor to head the new Education and Skills Authority. O'Connor, the former chief executive of Derry City Council, has been a controversial figure for years due to her turf war with Derry's City of Culture quango plus rows over her salary, perks and exit package. But through these recriminations, nobody has once suggested she has a tribal bone in her body. In fact, her record on falling out with a range of people regardless of religion puts her utterly beyond reproach.

QUAKER charity the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust is under pressure for funding Cage, the Islamic advocacy group that has blamed the security services for radicalising its former client 'Jihadi John'. The Charity Commission for England and Wales is considering a full statutory inquiry and this could have repercussions in Northern Ireland, which is a prominent part of the trust's work and where it is an influential player in the conflict resolution industry. The only difference between some of the views held by that industry and by Cage is that England has not had 20 years of peace processing to get used to them. It is unlikely that this will shake out without dragging us in.

THERE were apocalyptic headlines last December when Department of Education officials warned of mass sackings in schools. At least 1,000 teachers and 1,500 other staff would have to go within a year due to the "extremely bleak and difficult situation", he told a Stormont committee. Now it transpires that the actual figures will be 500 teachers and 1,000 other staff, with all departures voluntary. As the civil service redundancy scheme is currently demonstrating, there will never be large-scale compulsory layoffs in Northern Ireland's public sector. Avoiding that is Stormont's first priority.

newton@irishnews.com