When Prince Charles visited Hillsborough Castle this week most media attention focused on the attendance of Michelle O’Neill, who gave a faultless peace process performance.
Less noticed was that Arlene Foster chose to bring along Nigel Dodds, ennobled as Lord Dodds of Duncairn just a fortnight ago.
The former MP for North Belfast has been out of the limelight since losing his seat to Sinn Féin last year but he remains a major figure in the party, which has important implications.
Dodds was an original architect of Brexit, not just within the DUP but for UK politics as a whole. He was a founding member of the Leave campaign, sat on its board during the referendum, drove a progressively harder Brexit afterwards and left the Commons with his views still apparently unchanged. Despite the epic mistake this represents he remains a skilled political operator - head and shoulders above DUP colleagues. So what influence will he continue to have on the party’s Brexit position?
Sammy Wilson’s face-mask and Ian Paisley’s expenses are trivial questions by comparison.
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Brexit observers have puzzled for years over the promise, issued from Brussels as well as London, that Northern Ireland can benefit from both UK and EU trade deals.
Although the Withdrawal Agreement implies this in theory, experts can only see problems with it in practice.
Stormont’s economy committee is the latest to scratch its head over the issue.
Civil servants have told it that if the UK’s new trade deal with Japan allows in some Japanese goods below EU standards, the EU will not want those goods entering Northern Ireland.
The EU would have no concerns about Northern Ireland exporting to Japan. However, the Japanese might object to our goods if we cannot take theirs.
Firms here should still have some potential to benefit from EU and UK deals but the best of worlds is starting to look more like a trip around the multiverse.
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Coronavirus restrictions between Donegal and Northern Ireland have excited that charming group of people who see the epidemic as a constitutional competition.
Hopes or fears of a new partitionism are a bit of a stretch, from any perspective.
The Republic has had county-by-county measures for two months and Northern Ireland has had postcode and council area measures for one month, so having a section of border running between them is politically incidental.
Attempts to smooth over differences are more of a problem.
The executive has announced an 11 o’clock curfew for restaurants and bars that looks suspiciously like a compromise between the 10 o’clock curfew in England and the 11.30 curfew in the south. The result is that nobody is happy. Belfast venue The Limelight has asked to see “any medical, scientific or behavioural evidence in favour of such curfews”, which is doubly awkward for Stormont, as the UK government has admitted its decision for England was largely symbolic. Can you justify a curfew as a gesture based on a gesture?
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Mystery surrounds a claim by the Northern Ireland Landlords' Association that the Holyland area of Belfast has never been a family neighbourhood, so residents “trying to hold back the tide” of students should just give up and move out.
“Going back decades, the area was full of rooming houses, with tradesmen living in a house with a landlady. It was never the situation that there were lots of families with 2.2 children, as the residents can sometimes suggest,” a spokesman told the BBC.
Quite apart for the arrogant non-sequitur of this ‘argument’, it should be clear it is nonsense from the large primary school that has stood in the heart of the area for over 80 years and is still full of children from surrounding streets.
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Former billionaire Sean Quinn has expressed dismay that the managers of his one-time business, Quinn Industrial Holdings, are renaming it ‘Mannok’.
“Where they see the right to rebrand the company that they weren’t even part of putting together is hard to believe,” he told the Irish Times.
Perhaps even more unbelievably, the word Mannok only appears to have had one other use before in any language, on the Pacific island of Guam, where it means ‘chicken’.
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The Executive Office has published the latest Public Appointments Annual Report, along with the striking claim that the gender of 18 per cent of applicants and 4 per cent of successful candidates is unknown.
Everyone’s gender has always been known in previous years and the executive had a 50/50 gender equality target for this year.
Inside the report, the confusion is blamed on “a change in the data collection process”, leaving statisticians dependent on equal opportunities monitoring forms, which 18 per cent of applicants did not submit.
However, people who do not submit monitoring forms often have their ‘community background’ inferred from other details, such as schools attended. Why could this not be done for gender, using names and titles?
It seems that political fashion has brought us to the ultimate state of Northern Ireland modernity, where you no longer have to be a man or a woman - but you must still be a Protestant or a Catholic.
