An Irish News investigation has revealed that councillors across Northern Ireland take a staggeringly cavalier attitude towards declaring their financial interests, especially property and company directorships. This is a delicious vindication for Alliance, which has condemned other parties in Belfast for not allowing planning meetings to be recorded. In an Alliance newsletter last month, north Belfast councillor Nuala McAllister asked “what have they got to hide?” The furious response from non-Alliance colleagues including hints of libel action, accusations of breaking the code of conduct and a petition to the Northern Ireland Ombudsman signed by 31 councillors. If only declaration of interest forms were signed as speedily and conscientiously.
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Tories are disagreeing in public over what Brexit would mean for the border. Former chancellor Lord Lawson has told the BBC that 1950s-style checkpoints would return, which in turn has been flatly denied by secretary of state Theresa Villiers, who said Britain and Ireland would maintain the existing border of their common travel area. Both are incorrect. What would happen in practice would be beefed-up controls at ports and airports in Britain, effectively moving the border into the Irish sea. This is a prospect that will leave many unionists and nationalists as conflicted as the Tories. It also holds a certain irony for Villiers, a former transport secretary reshuffled to our shores after cabinet squabbles over aviation policy.
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Arlene Foster has got away with a disastrous election interview thanks to a Friday tea-time broadcast that dropped it down the back of the news cycle’s sofa. Quizzed by Radio Ulster’s Mark Devenport on his regular Inside Politics programme, the DUP leader barked and stumbled through questions on the decade of centenaries - an issue her party had just raised in its own manifesto. She seemed to backtrack to a hardline stance on the Easter Rising, yet moments later said she expected everyone in Northern Ireland to celebrate 100 years of partition. Of course, it is possible to take all manner of contradictory positions on complex history but the point is that Foster has still not worked out a civil way to do so after months of predictable questioning. This is a very bad sign.
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In what may be the biggest policy change of the election, the SDLP manifesto commits the party to integrated education. There are some references to new models of integration and an intriguing reference to Catholic schools being integrated but these are no weasel words - the manifesto specifically criticises the flawed DUP/Sinn Féin concept of ‘shared education’, with its segregated buildings, doorways and drinking fountains. So why has such a historic shift attracted so little publicity? Sadly, it seems to have been perceived as too strange, too implausible and too late.
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As Northern Ireland’s political leaders rushed to reveal their financial details, nationalism’s leaders truly excelled themselves. The SDLP’s Colum Eastwood issued a statement straight from the sixth form centre denouncing “Tory class war” and demanding Theresa Villiers reveal any “offshore interest”. This was most ungrateful when Villiers has just renewed the special secrecy provision for party donors in Northern Ireland, which the SDLP supports. Meanwhile, Martin ‘I’m paid the same as my driver’ McGuinness tweeted that he had “put info on my finances into the public domain” during his 2011 Irish presidential bid. That ‘info’ comprised a bank statement showing almost his entire Stormont salary (minus party deduction) going on his weekly grocery bill, which frankly raised more questions that it answered.
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Belfast City Council is considering asking Stormont to hand over powers for transport, jobs and regeneration along the pattern of England’s ‘city deals’, which notably have just devolved NHS spending to Manchester. This is almost laughably parochial, as city deals are an English response to Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution. In terms of powers and population, Northern Ireland itself is a city region - and a relatively small one. Perhaps this would be clearer if Stormont was renamed Greater Belfast Council.
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It is that time of year again when schools close early for a week, causing chaos for working parents, in order to facilitate parent-teacher interviews. This used to be done in the evenings on ‘parent nights’ but unions now advise schools that teachers must not work outside their timetabled hours. So why are unions forever proclaiming how much work teachers do outside their timetabled hours?
newton@irishnews.com
