While we wait for Sinn Fein and the DUP to unveil a deal they effectively reached two years ago, Northern Ireland’s manufacturing sector is rapidly descending into a genuine crisis, with over 1,000 jobs lost in a week.
Bombardier’s announcement that it will cut costs by 20 per cent by 2017 is a particular rebuke to Stormont on two fronts.
First, it highlights the failure to improve our energy infrastructure, mainly due to hold-ups with planning. Electricity costs are so uncompetitive as a result that Bombardier has been reduced to building two large power plants of its own at its sites in Belfast and Newtownabbey, while having to cross its fingers that even these would be approved.
Second, the cost-cutting Bombardier is about to embark on makes a mockery of the hysteria and deadlock at Stormont over slightly below-inflation adjustments to its block grant. The welfare budget, supposedly at the heart of this ‘crisis’, has actually increased in real terms.
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It is traditional before a Sinn Fein-DUP deal for both sides to arrange tribal distractions for their most vulnerable supporters.
The singing of God Save the Queen at a cross-community Stormont remembrance event was begun by the TUV, so it does not fall under this category. It may be more like last year’s ‘curry my yoghurt’ row, which began when Sinn Fein deputy speaker Mitchel McLaughlin addressed Gregory Campbell in Irish, a language he must know the DUP MLA does not understand.
This year, McLaughlin’s first as speaker, he managed to drop the remembrance service’s usual anthem without anyone being made aware of it until some (including the secretary of state) had started singing along with the TUV. The lesson for unionists is that it is the over-reaction that makes the news.
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The PSNI was unusually keen to elaborate after a burglary at the north Down home of Stephen Shaw QC, one of the three people who signed off the recent report on paramilitary activity.
In a statement to the BBC, a senior officer said: “Police have carried out a full and thorough investigation and there is no evidence to suggest that this was a targeted burglary. There have been a number of other burglaries at high value properties in the same area in recent weeks.”
Whatever happened to ‘we cannot comment on individual cases’?
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Things got a little tetchy as Stormont’s Nama inquiry questioned senior civil servant Richard Pengelly, the husband of newly-appointed DUP junior minister Emma Pengelly.
MLAs were surprised that Mr Pengelly could not recall details of his 2010 appointment by DUP finance minister Sammy Wilson to the Northern Ireland Nama advisory panel, along with two others including businessman Frank Cushnahan.
Mr Pengelly explained that it was years ago, had less “perceived importance” at the time and that the civil service would “grind to a halt” if every conversation had to minuted.
Did Wilson’s numerous statements of concern about Nama and the Northern Ireland economy in 2010 not stress the issue’s importance? Is Pengelly implying the panel for this major task was selected by mere conversation?
Also, if the civil service ground to a halt, how would anyone know?
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All 10 of Northern Ireland’s regional tax offices are to be centralised at a new facility in Belfast, which among other things ends one of the loopiest equality arguments of recent times.
In 2008, HMRC decided to close Craigavon’s tax office and relocate its 120 jobs to the existing office in Newry. In response, Craigavon Borough Council commissioned an ‘equality assessment’ which claimed the move would be sectarian because Craigavon has a more religiously balanced population than Newry.
Although the implication of this is that all employment should drift towards evenly shared areas, the report was endorsed by every council party and accepted by HMRC, which last year announced the closure of Newry instead.
Now that everyone will be moving to Belfast, with its religiously balanced population, Craigavon councillors must presumably have no complaints.
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Staff at Maghaberry have reportedly stopped a republican prisoner from playing an Ed Sheeran CD at his wedding, citing unspecified security concerns. Perhaps the prisoner - convicted murderer Thomas McWilliams - should have chosen Sheeran’s 2005 album The Orange Room.
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Supporters of MLA Colum Eastwood, who is challenging Alasdair McDonnell for the SDLP leadership today, have accused the BBC of bias for covering McDonnell’s leader’s address to the SDLP conference, which is also today.
“When a speech is being broadcast live, it changes the whole nature of events,” a source from the Eastwood camp told the Belfast Telegraph. “It creates a euphoric atmosphere in the room with whooping and clapping from delegates. This will all be happening for Alasdair while the polls remain open.”
This is the greatest compliment McDonnell has ever received as a speechmaker. Usually, even his supporters watch him through their hands.
newton@irishnews.com
