WITH a year to go until Stormont acquires corporation tax powers, following a decade of lobbying and negotiations, the whole exercise is starting to look pointless.
Chancellor George Osborne has just scheduled further cuts to the UK rate that will leave it not much higher than Ireland’s by 2020.
For many firms, complying with separate Northern Ireland rules will scarcely be worth the bother.
A lower UK rate introduces the possibility of Stormont undercutting the south but that is a non-starter for two reasons.
First, the north’s new power precludes the international tax avoidance that actually makes the southern system attractive.
Second, cutting business taxes is only digestible to Sinn Fein as a policy of all-Ireland harmonisation.
Meanwhile, the property rates that are a much bigger burden for businesses in Northern Ireland have just been cut by Osborne - in England. Stormont’s business rates policy is still stuck in a review.
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GEORGE Osborne also nearly halved capital gains tax, which is widely seen as a carrot to encourage buy-to-let landlords to sell up before they are hit with various sticks announced last year.
The UK government recognises there is a crisis of housing supply and cost, that this is corrosive to society and that landlordism is a major cause.
Meanwhile, Stormont’s review of the private rented sector, begun in November 2014 and promised this January, has vanished into electoral season oblivion.
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GERRY Adams could have been pragmatic and diplomatic about being locked out of President Obama’s St Patrick’s Day reception and simply laughed it off.
It is all too believable that the White House has the same hapless jobsworths in its security hut as everywhere else - and that has since been the US Secret Service’s official explanation.
But instead, Adams has alleged splits inside the US government, a Washington conspiracy against his party and an attempt by America’s first black president to send the TD for Louth to “the back of the bus”.
Quite apart from being bumptious, paranoid and absurdly self-pitying, this has caused people to ask if Adams and the White House really have fallen out - a scenario in which the White House will never appear to be the loser.
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AFTER DUP enterprise minister Jonathan Bell incorrectly informed the assembly that a majority of Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce members backed Brexit, the business organisation not only demanded he retract this remark but that it be deleted from Hansard, Stormont’s official report.
It is usually our politicians who are accused of re-writing the past. Bemused Hansard staff had to inform the Chamber of Commerce that their job is to record accurately, not record accuracy.
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NAMA refused to testify before Stormont’s finance committee on the grounds that as an Irish state agency it is answerable to the Oireachtas.
The committee’s report into the sale of Nama’s Northern Ireland’s loan book, published last week, noted that this refusal stopped it questioning relevant witnesses.
Now Nama has lifted its petticoats at the “unsubstantiated and unfounded suggestion” it was unhelpful, given that it answered 105 Stormont questions in writing, invited Stormont to submit more and addressed the equivalent Dáil committee while the chair of Stormont’s committee was present.
But none of that substitutes for being questioned in person, while completely contradicting the stance that Nama can only answer to the Oireachtas.
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A “LIMITED number of high-end apartments” have gone on sale at Belfast’s Obel tower as part of a £2m “significant refurbishment and major upgrade” of Ireland’s tallest building.
Yet publicity videos show the same basic glazing and electric radiators that attracted so much criticism when the tower first opened.
Obel was meant to have gas-fired central heating and reflective full-height glazing (equally important for temperature control) yet these features disappeared between its initial publicity and final completion, which took place either side of the property crash.
The glazing has such an external visual impact on such a dominant building that it is an issue of public as well as private interest.
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WITH canvassing for May’s election now firmly underway, it is just as well everyone has forgotten about Stormont almost collapsing six months ago over an IRA murder - especially as the report that somehow stopped it collapsing said IRA members are kept busy with “activity like electioneering and leafleting”.
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A BLIND blind woman has brought Lisburn and Forestside Town Council to a judicial review over the kerbstones in its new public realm scheme - not because they are too high, as you might expect, but because they are too low for guide dogs to recognise.
The woman wants an equality impact assessment to be performed but that would bring in the opposing height concerns of wheelchair users.
Convenience for prams could also be raised, as people with dependents are an equality category of the same legal standing as the disabled.
How far we have come from the days when kerbstones were only controversial if you painted them.
newton@irishnews.com
