Opinion

Newton Emerson: Leaked briefing notes show NIO's lines are wearing thin

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.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

A briefing note to secretary of state Karen Bradley, accidentally emailed to journalists by the Northern Ireland Office, show her ‘lines to take’ on a border poll are that she believes nationalists would not win it, the Good Friday Agreement test for a poll is therefore not met, so as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said, discussing it at this time is “unhelpful and unnecessary.”

Two days later, an opinion poll by highly-regarded pollster Lord Ashcroft - a Tory peer and former deputy chair of Bradley’s party - has found support for the union on a knife-edge, with only 49 per cent support excluding don’t knows.

Clearly, the NIO’s lines are wearing thin - yet Bradley’s briefed beliefs are the only test the agreement sets.

A judicial review into precisely how a border poll should be called, brought by victims campaigner Raymond McCord, is due to be heard shortly. The most obvious answer this question has always raised, coherent with the agreement, is the make-up of the assembly. If a judge concurs, Stormont elections will go from proxy Border polls to the legal hair-trigger of a poll.

How’s that for unhelpful?

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Radius Housing has banned the media from entering Russell Court, the apartment building in south Belfast where 60 residents face sudden eviction over fire concerns - and which Bradley’s briefing note compared directly to the Grenfell Tower disaster.

A Belfast Telegraph journalist was ordered off the premises when a resident wanted to speak to him, in her own home, about concerns over emergency fire marshals.

This cannot be a safety issue. If it is safe for residents to live in the building ahead of eviction, it is certainly safe for a journalist to visit.

Housing Associations in Northern Ireland are classed as public bodies, meaning it is unlawful for them to take any action incompatible with the Human Rights Act.

The rights to a private life and to freely exchange information have been flagrantly breached in this instance - but of course, the people affected have been given more urgent concerns.

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The Department for Infrastructure is holding a laughably furtive public consultation exercise on trialling private taxis in Belfast’s bus lanes, following determined lobbying by the taxi industry. The trial is being rushed through before the new Glider rapid transit system starts, sabotaging it from day one and leaving no baseline usage for the trial to assess.

The consultation exercise runs for just three weeks, has not been publicised and will hold no public meetings. It has been launched without appearing on Stormont’s consultation website and without a response form or any publicly-available documentation. Submissions are only accepted via a 51-character email address that Unite the Union had to ask the department to obtain.

Anyone bringing this farce to a judicial review could have it quashed at a stroke. Are brow-beaten officials trying to sabotage the sabotage?

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The Orange Lodge mentioned in last week’s column over a planned parade through a mixed residential neighbourhood in north Belfast has been in touch to clarify reports.

Cavehill Temperance Lodge says it is not new but a reconstituted lodge last open in 1976, there have been parades in the area before, this one is not so much a parade as processing a banner to the lodge master’s house and it has nothing to do with the flagging of lampposts in the area.

With masters appointed annually, processing of banners by reconstituted lodges looks like a way of pulling ‘traditional routes’ out of thin air.

At least the brethren are not that bothered about me calling them “plebeians”, unlike tribune of the people and former DUP MLA Nelson McCausland, who has demanded I acknowledge this was a “class-based insult.”

Of course it was a class-based insult. I really don’t see how I could have made that any clearer.

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More judicial review news: a Co Tyrone woman has brought proceedings against the flying of Union flags outside courthouses on designated days, on the grounds it denies nationalists equal treatment as required by the Good Friday Agreement’s provision for parity of esteem.

This will be an interesting judgment. The agreement states that sovereignty is not a matter of equality - Northern Ireland is fully British until it is fully Irish. Parity of esteem is a separate concept to encompass that transition. But where do sovereign symbols fit into this? Logically, equal treatment in this context means the rules for flying the union flag today should apply to the Irish flag in a united Ireland - not that a judge has jurisdiction over that future jurisdiction.

Perhaps courts should just run their flags up the nearest lamppost, where no law apparently applies.

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Sky TV has geo-blocked RTE’s Sunday Game GAA coverage, causing a fuss that could not fail to be noticed, even by those of us who think sport should be geo-blocked everywhere.

Apologising, Sky blamed “an issue with the list of ‘black outs’ we were provided with for that evening.” In other words, somebody forgot to push a button. This is hardly the political outrage many complaints have implied. Let us hope it is sorted out before Arlene Foster attends her first match - a highlight nobody will want to miss.

newton@irishnews.com