Martin McGuinness was widely mocked for lobbying Washington on welfare reform, with observers noting US politicians will hardly bother themselves with our trifling financial concerns. However, there is a deeper reason why nobody in Washington will touch this with a ten foot pole. In 2012, President Obama reversed Bill Clinton’s flagship welfare reform programme, whose goals and methods were similar to Tory policy today. This has remained a controversial issue between Democrats, let alone between Democrats and Republicans. Salting those wounds on our behalf is simply not going to happen.
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A snattery statement from Gerry Adams on welfare reform, issued on the tenth anniversary of the IRA’s disbandment, appears to have been partly provoked by misinterpreting a throwaway remark from David Cameron. “British resolve saw off the IRA,” Adams quoted the prime minister as saying, before correcting him with “the reality is that the IRA was never defeated”. What Cameron actually said, in a speech two weeks ago on Islamic extremism, was: “British resolve saw off the IRA’s assaults on our way of life.” Not quite the same thing, with no mention of defeat. In any case, both men are wrong. The IRA was defeated ten years ago by American resolve, after Washington snubbed Adams and banned Sinn Fein fundraising following the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney.
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Belfast City Airport has engaged in some highly unattractive gloating after Boal Airport Parking lost a planning appeal. Boal, based in the nearby Ikea multi-storey, will have to close with the loss of eight jobs. In a statement, the airport asked: “why should others be able to flout the law for commercial gain?” However, Boal had approval from the Planning Service, only for the planners’ recommendation to be blocked then reversed after DUP councillor Adam Newton was asked by Belfast City Airport to raise a technicality about ‘identifying need’. The fact that Boal was trading profitably and the airport was planning to extend its own car park somehow did not identify a need, as an appeal has now confirmed - but to imply that Boal was flouting the law is audacious, to put it mildly.
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Westminster is having a fit of the vapours after a government lawyer informed the UK’s intelligence oversight body that modern mass snooping techniques cannot avoid spying on MPs. This breaches the ‘Wilson doctrine’, named after Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who assured MPs and peers in 1966 that their telephones would never be bugged. Cue much pompous harrumphing from the Commons and the Lords, where few must either know or care that MPs of all persuasions in Northern Ireland have clearly been watched around the clock since the outbreak of the Troubles. At the Leeds Castle talks in 2004, Sinn Fein’s MPs arrived bearing a huge listening device uncovered in their west Belfast office.
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The sex and drugs scandal involving Lord Sewel is even more entertaining when you realise he gave his name to the Sewel Convention, a key part of how devolution works. The convention dictates that Westminster should not legislate on a devolved matter without first obtaining consent, making it the ‘consenting adults’ part of our constitutional settlement.
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Sammy Wilson has proposed that a cement quarry near Larne be transformed into a global tourist attraction. Magheramore Quarry is where scenes set on ‘The Wall’ are filmed for Game of Thrones. As the DUP MP pointed out, there are a large number of “buses and people who stop and try to get views of it.” However, the 300-mile long, 700-foot tall icy barrier in the series is a computer-generated effect, so while Magheramore is a striking location, the only thing there is to get a view of is a quarry near Larne. This may prove a slight disappointment.
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Antrim and Newtownabbey Council has announced it will not be fining a farmer for smoking in his tractor - not because everyone spent last week laughing at it but because the farmer sent in an “article 12 notice” that “the vehicle is only used by one person”, according to a council statement that also mentioned the Smoking (Northern Ireland) Order 2006. Yet there is no mention of this impressively formal-sounding procedure in that legislation, in which article 12 refers merely to the “obstruction of officers” and says nothing about notices, let alone numbers in a workplace. It seems that the farmer, having already told the council’s ‘smoking enforcement officer’ they were wrong, then sent in a letter to the same effect - which was plainly received with enormous relief.
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Antrim and Newtownabbey Council was regrettably unable to do anything about large piles of smoking tyres in recent months, preferring instead to engage in community liaison whatever and so on. However, Newry and Mourne District Council has managed to remove piles of tyres from a residential street, where they were being stockpiled for an internment bonfire. Now that this has been shown to be possible, there really is no reason why every council cannot do it next year.
newton@irishnews.com