Time will soon tell how badly DUP leader Arlene Foster has been damaged by a party revolt. Eleven of her MLAs defied the whip and abstained on a bill they fear could weaken the St Andrews Agreement protections against ministerial ‘solo runs’. Two more failed to show up and three MPs urged caution.
Foster is in no imminent danger of being replaced but she has been firmly marked for the blame if the bill has unpopular consequences.
A striking feature of the revolt was that it included four of the so-called ‘twelve apostles’, or five counting DUP exile Jim Wells, who rebelled against Ian Paisley in 2006 for accepting the St Andrews Agreement.
Some people are never happy.
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The requirement for ministers to consult the whole executive is specified in two parts of the law. It gets a direct mention in the legislation enacting the Good Friday Agreement, as amended by St Andrews, plus a second in the ministerial code the same legislation requires the executive and assembly to pass.
If you find that confusing, you are not alone.
Sinn Féin junior minister Declan Kearney says because the new bill updates only the direct mention, nothing can happen until Stormont reconvenes in the autumn and changes the code as well. The UUP fears he is right, the SDLP says its department’s legal advice is that he is wrong, while the DUP response might best be likened to a deer in the headlights.
Whoever is correct, the confusion need not have arisen. When the St Andrews Agreement introduced the requirement to consult the whole executive, it simply changed the legislation and the code at the same time. The DUP might recall this, having claimed the credit for it.
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Suspicion is growing that Northern Ireland’s health service is being restructured under cover of the pandemic.
The Department of Health is turning Lagan Valley hospital into an elective day procedure centre and Musgrave Park and Altnagelvin into orthopaedic hubs. While coping with coronavirus is the stated reason for the “three-month temporary changes” they are in line with the 2016 Bengoa report on NHS reform, supported by all five executive parties.
UUP health minister Robin Swann has told the assembly there will be full staff and public consultation but it will have to take place as the changes are being implemented.
Consultation is a requirement but it must be asked what point there is to more of it when the results are largely predictable. Last year’s consultation on breast cancer services, centralising them from five locations to three as per Bengoa, produced opposition from patients, staff and politicians in the two areas to be rationalised and support in the other three. How many more times does the parish pump need to be cranked?
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Belfast councillors have paused approval for the £500 million ‘Tribeca’ redevelopment while they seek new information on the huge retail, office and apartment scheme.
This is a brave moment to spurn investment, yet also a pivotal moment. Lockdown has accelerated the move to shopping online, caused a reappraisal of apartments as places to live and persuaded 40 per cent of Northern Ireland’s employers to consider permanent home-working, according to recruiters. Separate plans to populate central Belfast with students look equally uncertain, with Ulster University’s new campus ill-designed for social distancing and student accommodation being converted into hotel space before it has even opened.
So what is the city centre for? The £11m that Stormont announced this week for new shop fronts across all 11 councils, while welcomed by retailers, shows how much that question overwhelms easy answers.
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One of competitive victimhood’s least impressive contests returned to the assembly this week, as DUP education minister Peter Weir announced an expert panel to examine educational underachievement and socio-economic background, as promised in the New Decade, New Approach deal.
Weir added that Protestant working-class boys are the highest percentage category of unqualified school-leavers, as also mentioned in the deal.
Sinn Féin former education minister John O’Dowd objected that more working-class Catholic boys are unqualified in absolute terms. He presented this as correcting Weir, yet both were right.
The fact is there is not much in it and underachievement should be approached as a common problem. But where is the fun in that?
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Things are getting he-said she-said over the closure of HMS Caroline. The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) says it regularly reported funding shortfalls to the DUP-controlled Department for the Economy and is “shocked” by “misrepresented facts”.
The department insists it did not have “sufficient time” to devise “a new funding model, redraft a new operating agreement, or to procure a new operator of the attraction”.
Whatever the timing, this implied warning makes no sense.
HMS Caroline and its collection are the property of NMRN, which acquired full ownership from the Ministry of Defence in 2012 and had planned to move everything to Portsmouth, until a lottery grant and Stormont funding kept it in Belfast.
So any ‘new operator’ would have only a visitor centre without a ship or artefacts. Titanic Quarter has one of those already.
