Opinion

Why does one more cross-border body matter to DUP?

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Brexit will have a negative impact on the Republic's economy, Dublin's Central Bank warned. Picture by Yui Mok, Press Association
Brexit will have a negative impact on the Republic's economy, Dublin's Central Bank warned. Picture by Yui Mok, Press Association Brexit will have a negative impact on the Republic's economy, Dublin's Central Bank warned. Picture by Yui Mok, Press Association

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has renewed the call for an all-Ireland Brexit forum, first raised by Taoiseach Enda Kenny then dropped when the DUP objected. This is mainly about Martin looking more prime ministerial than Kenny, although he also found time for a poke at Gerry Adams, saying: “The greatest single barrier to Irish unity has been, and will always be, Sinn Féin/IRA.”

The DUP responded by repeating that a forum is unnecessary because there are already enough north-south mechanisms to discuss Brexit. If so, to turn that point around, why object to another one? It seems that while the DUP has reconciled itself to ‘Sinn Féin/IRA’, it cannot cope with being even partially responsible for another cross-border body.

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The PSNI has received its annual appraisal, known as its Police Effectiveness, Efficiency and Legitimacy report (PEEL - geddit?) According to this entirely worthwhile exercise from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the PSNI “does not have a crime prevention strategy” and is “not consistently good” at protecting victims of crime. Yet the overall assessment is that the PSNI is “using its resources well to keep people safe” - a conclusion that only becomes more remarkable upon reflection.

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DUP agriculture minister Michelle McIlveen has welcomed new official figures from her department “highlighting the growth of the local food and drinks processing sector”, according to an executive press release. This would seem to be timely after the EU referendum result, given the vulnerability of the sector to Brexit. However, as the press release concedes, these “newly released” figures are for 2014, with only “provisional estimates” for 2015. In other words, it has taken the Department of Agriculture two years to compile basic sectoral statistics - the same length of time the UK has to negotiate its departure from the EU.

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Left-wing unions despise the free press and the National Union of Journalists is no exception. It squares this circle by lecturing members against “hatred and discrimination” - one of 12 points in its code of conduct but the one most guaranteed to get the comrades up in arms. Perhaps the union’s Belfast branch thought it was upholding this principle when it tweeted that loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson is “not a journalist” and “is not and has never been a member of Belfast & District branch of the NUJ.” In fact, Bryson has joined the NUJ and fully qualifies for membership, via his blogging and other writing. There is still a procedure to go through to affiliate him to a branch but that does not explain why Belfast would not accept him, let alone why it has publicly renounced him. Could this be some form of discrimination?

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Northern Ireland’s new taxi laws only came into force two months ago, an incredible eight years after the relevant legislation was passed - a process that itself took two years. This dithering was due to constant complaints from the taxi industry combined with the inability of DUP and then SDLP ministers to resist them. Now responsibility for this portfolio has passed to Sinn Féin infrastructure minister Chris Hazzard, who has promptly announced a “full and comprehensive review of the current taxi legislation”, once again based on complaints from the industry, the most pressing of which is apparently that “wedding, funeral and novelty vehicles” must not pick up general fares. How quaint this already seems, considering Uber’s recent arrival. Another decade from now, when Stormont’s next legislation is enacted, we will be summoning driverless cars by the power of thought.

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Belfast’s DUP Lord Mayor has denied media reports that he “launched” the city’s gay pride festival. Brian Kingston spoke at the event’s launch but did not launch it, he has explained - a distinction that appears to have been lost on everyone else present. In future, for the avoidance of doubt, no unionist should be considered to have launched gay pride until they smash a bottle of Schloer over a float.

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Robert MacLiam Wilson’s 1996 novel about the ceasefires, Eureka Street, features a mysterious graffito “OTG” that suddenly appears across Belfast. Its meaning is never explained. The authorities fear it is a new terrorist organisation, while the narrator wonders if it is a mindless sectarian insult like FTQ, FTP, KAH or KAT. Now a bizarrely similar puzzle has cropped up on Orange Halls across Co Antrim, which have being daubed with FTQ and KAH but also the new and unknown TBLA. Could the literary parallel be deliberate? People who engage in this type of behaviour are often voracious readers.

newton@irishnews.com