Let joy be unconfined, for a Stormont House deal is clearly in the works. Sinn Fein is holding a “leadership tour” around Northern Ireland, where audiences are being told how awful the Tories and their welfare reform policies are - then informed this means compromises must be made to avoid direct rule. Arlene Foster has said her party’s rotating ministerial resignations could end next week when the independent paramilitary assessment panel reports on the IRA, which means the DUP desperately wants to stop doing the hokey-cokey and expects an imminent reason to do so. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein and the British government have started a separate row over dealing with the past, which should distract nicely from their dealings in the present.
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Martin McGuinness is so confident of resolving the current Stormont crisis that he is already planning the next one. At the first leadership tour meeting in Derry, the deputy first minister said if the A5 road upgrade “doesn’t go ahead in the aftermath of the next assembly election, which is only a few months away, we will not be agreeing a programme for government.” Mystery surrounds why Sinn Fein would do this when - as McGuinness added - Peter Robinson is also committed to the project. Also, the DUP has just taken the roads ministry off a foot-dragging UUP and in any case the A5 is held up by a ruling from a High Court judge. However, the key point to note is that Sinn Fein is telling its supporters there will be an election, a DUP/Sinn Fein-led executive and a programme for government all pretty much on schedule.
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The DUP’s repeatedly resigning ministers are still receiving their executive salaries, it has emerged, despite a party promise this would not happen. Elsewhere in Stormont, DUP MLA Jonathan Bell was magically transformed back into an enterprise minister just in time to move a credit unions bill, while Mervyn Storey used a ministerial car to get to his re-nomination as social development minister, which appears to be putting the cart before the horse. This all raises the confusing question of whether the DUP’s team is actually resigning, even temporarily. Strictly speaking, Peter Robinson is on six weeks’ leave and his ministers are resigning with seven days’ notice, then withdrawing their notice just before it comes into effect. If the assembly’s payroll system has to count this as still being in office, then the DUP is still in office.
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DUP absenteeism may explain a strange debate in the assembly, which passed a Sinn Fein motion calling for a review into regulation of private landlords. DUP social development minister Mervyn Storey announced precisely such a review last November and it is believed to be nearing completion but of course Storey was not in the chamber to point this out. During the debate, Sinn Fein MLA Phil Flanagan said private landlords in Northern Ireland are receiving £300m a year via housing benefit, which linked the subject to welfare reform. We should find out soon enough if that was relevant.
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The Equality Commission skirted the edge of its remit with a headline-making statement on “key inequalities” in education. A focus on underachievement among working-class Protestant boys ignored the fact that social class is not a statutory equality category. Nor is income, for which class is usually a proxy. There is a more profound reasons why this is not a useful categorisation in pupil performance. Working-class people who value education produce middle-class kids.
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GP Dr Anne McCloskey, who has just announced her independent candidacy for Stormont, is best known in her native Derry for opposing the Fleadh’s inclusion in the 2013 UK City of Culture, denouncing it as “a dilution” of Irishness. However, McCloskey is also a supporter of homeopathy, describing a 2009 NHS trial as “very positive”. So perhaps she believes that diluting Irishness makes it stronger.
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It would “not have been sustainable” for police to patrol the area where four men were murdered by the UDA in the space of a year, a former police chief has told the inquest into one of the deaths. Roy Suitters was asked by lawyers representing the family of Daniel McColgan, a 20-year-old postman shot at Rathcoole sorting office in 2002, if UDA death threats to that workplace and subsequent blanket threats and sectarian murders should have led to increased patrols. Suitters said the service “couldn’t sustain police patrols at every premises in north Belfast and Newtownabbey where Catholics worked”. The question being missed is why the police could not sustain a crackdown on the UDA instead, which should have been a far more realistic expectation.
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Reporting the arrest of Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, various media outlets have described him as a “prominent republican”. This distinguishes him from Bobby Storey, who is usually described as a “well-known republican”, and Eddie Copeland, who is usually described as a “leading republican.” Is there some sort of ranking system at work here?
newton@irishnews.com
