A silly row has rumbled on all week over whether it is irresponsible to link Brexit to last Saturday’s dissident republican car bomb in Derry. Of course there is a link. Although the bomb was clearly timed to coincide with the centenary of the Soloheadbeg ambush and dissidents hardly need new justifications for violence, Brexit provides them with an undeniable bonus context.
The truly irresponsible reaction was the countless claims online that the intelligence services must somehow have permitted the bombing to proceed for unspecified securocrat purposes. This reflexive excuse-making, too often indulged by public representatives, provides dissidents with guaranteed cover should their recklessness result in death, as it almost did last weekend. Whoever phoned through the warning three minutes after the bomb was planted did not realise the Samaritans now use national call-handling. While the call was passed around bemused offices in the West Midlands, a crowd of young people walked right past the bomb.
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The no deal Brexit staring contest has produced a pleasing symmetry as it becomes clear the Irish government’s contingency to avoid a hard border is to put up a sea border between itself and the rest of the EU.
This is very much not something Dublin or Brussels wish to do. But there is a limit to how much they can complain about it when it is essentially a larger version of the backstop sea border between Northern Ireland and Britain, which apparently would be almost painless.
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There must be some provenance to the Daily Telegraph’s claim that Prime Minister Theresa May was “mulling over” changes to the Good Friday Agreement to give Dublin assurances on the border.
Downing Street flatly denied the story but it is unlikely the newspaper’s ministerial sources simply made the whole thing up. An overheard suggestion around the cabinet table must have been misunderstood.
There was misunderstanding in much of the response, with politicians in Dublin, Belfast and London raging against any suggestion the agreement could be unilaterally altered - not that the Daily Telegraph had said Dublin would be kept in the dark.
In fact, the agreement has been frequently and sometimes fundamentally changed over the past 20 years, including unilateral amendments to its enabling legislation by both the British and Irish governments, not always in consultation with each other.
Perhaps if more attention had been paid to that our politics might be on a firmer footing.
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On hearing that Ian Paisley cost Co-operation Ireland £6,000 for a first-class flight to a New York peace conference, an understandable reaction would be that Co-operation Ireland sounds exactly like the sort of taxpayer-funded ‘charity’ whose main purpose is flying people across the Atlantic for peace conferences - so why not travel in style?
Disappointingly, however, Co-operation Ireland is not among the vast number of organisations to which this view applies. It really does raise most of its money from private donations and spend most of it on the ground. The thought of how many sponsored cycle rides it took to get Paisley his extra leg-room is somewhat infuriating.
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Belfast City Council has approved another £200,000 for this year’s West Belfast Festival in a procedure that has been questioned by Alliance and arts organisation who feel they have missed out.
Everyone was keen to stress they were not criticising Feile - just the transparency of the council’s funding process. Yet that process could hardly be clearer. For every penny of public money the DUP extracts for loyalist-linked causes, it has agreed that Sinn Féin can have a matching sum. As there are so many loyalist issues and organisations to deal with and the DUP is so skilled at extracting public money, this is sending a flood of gold up the Falls Road to the extent that Sinn Féin scarcely knows what to do with it.
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Not content with the routine practice of excluding the press and public from meetings when planning matters are discussed, Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council has excluded one of its own councillors.
Independent unionist David Jones, a member of the council’s planning committee, claims he was told to leave before planning permission was discussed for a new £45 million college, which he opposes. The college is controversial because it is to be built on parkland in central Craigavon. Campaigners have accused the council of railroading the project through over public objections.
Jones claims he was also told he could not attend the meeting in a listening capacity and his exclusion was due to “legal advice”, possibly related to other matters on the agenda. If so, why not ask him to leave only when those matters arose?
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Hospitality tycoon Bill Wolsey, developer of some of Belfast’s best-known hotels, has been accused of sexism by Sinn Féin after saying of the Stormont deadlock: “we have replaced the men of violence with the women of intransigence.”
Sinn Féin has in turn been accused of making a fuss over nothing. This is one of those semantic arguments that can go on forever, so it might be more useful simply to note that the premise of the Women’s Coalition has been sadly disproven.
newton@irishnews.com
