Nick Hardwick, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales, has declared Maghaberry to be the “most dangerous” prison he has ever seen. This is a claim at odds with the statistics. Maghaberry and Northern Ireland’s prisons in general have significantly lower death in custody rates than the prison estate in England and Wales. This applies across all categories of death - natural causes, murder, self-inflicted and accident. Furthermore, death rates in every category are rising sharply in England and Wales, while Maghaberry and Northern Ireland’s overall rates are steady or falling. Maghaberry certainly has unique and serious problems but Hardwick may have over-reacted to them.
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DUP health minister Simon Hamilton has shut down the Heath and Social Care board (HSC), the top-tier NHS quango set up in 2009. As HSC oversaw almost everything under Hamilton’s department, either it had to go or his civil servants had to go - so it is no surprise who has gone, although HSC did itself no favours by failing to control staff and salary levels. It is a surprise that Hamilton has spared the Public Health Agency (PHA), the other top-tier NHS quango, as it was identified along with HSC as duplicating departmental management in a review last January. Best known for warning people to lose weight, wash their hands and so on, PHA also performs some useful functions for health trusts such as coordinating medical screening programmes. However, of the £100m it spent on its own and the trusts’ behalf last year, 20 per cent went on the PHA’s administrative overheads alone.
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Hamilton’s cull of a duplicated layer of management is a lesson that could be learned at the departments of enterprise, education, culture, social development and regional redevelopment, each of which delegate the bulk of their functions to a handful of subsidiary quangos. Sinn Fein culture minister Caral Ni Chuilin must have particular cause to wonder about the Arts Council, after this week’s protest at Stormont over cuts to its funding. The council spent £13m last year on the arts but cost another £3m to run, giving it an administrative overhead of 23 per cent. Nearly all its arts spending consists of re-awarding regular grants, deepening the mystery of why this cannot simply be done inside Ni Chuilin’s department.
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As its pre-arranged deal with the DUP looms, Sinn Fein is finding time to concentrate on its real opposition - a lone Trotskyite councillor in west Belfast. Gerry Carroll of People Before Profit, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Socialist Workers Party, proposed a motion at Belfast City Council supporting the Fallswater Centre for people with learning difficulties (not that the council has anything to do with a health trust amenity). So Sinn Fein proposed an amendment that the centre also be “open to the wider community”. Convoluted voting followed, with both sides claiming victory and Sinn Fein claiming Carroll had been defeated, adding “we have no desire to turn this serious issue into a political football”. Perish the thought.
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It is strange that unionists have not learned to play these procedural games, despite Sinn Fein running rings around them once again with Stormont’s fifth vote on same-sex marriage. As any student union officer knows, the way to sink an opponent’s motion without getting your hands dirty is to back it in full then tack on an amendment they cannot possibly support, forcing them to vote against their own proposal while you innocently roll your eyes at the insanity of it all. Why would any party resort to a petition of concern instead? Dreaming up something the DUP wants that Sinn Fein does not want must be harder than commonly supposed.
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The infantilising concept of the ‘trigger warning’ has arrived in Northern Ireland from an unexpected direction. Slapping warnings on artistic and intellectual material that might conceivably hurt someone’s feelings began on loony left American campuses but will now arrive at the Ulster Museum courtesy of the TUV, which has objected to a painting that appears to show Orangemen in Ku Klux Klan hats, if you squint at it hard enough in the right light. After further complaints from the DUP and the Orange Order, the museum has erected warning signs reading: “Visitors may find some images in this exhibition thought-provoking, controversial and potentially offensive.” If the Ulster Museum thinks it is being clever with this passive-aggressive sarcasm, it is sadly mistaken. The signs are a trigger warning. Soon, they will be everywhere.
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A cross-border Steven Nolan show, in association with RTE’s Prime Time, was based on a poll showing 13 per cent support within Northern Ireland for Irish unity in the short to medium term. This was hardly the shock finding the programme makers suggested. At the last election, Sinn Fein voters numbered 13 per cent of Northern Ireland’s adult population.
newtonemerson@irishnews.com
