Closing schools is a finely balanced decision but it should have been obvious from the first wave that it might need to happen again. Winter waves are generally worse, cases in Northern Ireland began rising sharply from September and circuit breakers without school closures never quite got numbers under control.
Being a finely balanced decision, it should also have been obvious it might have to be taken quickly.
All of this makes the lack of contingency planning by the DUP-controlled Department of Education simply extraordinary. There have been six months since the last lockdown to learn from its many problems and improve preparations, for both remote learning and care of children who need provision in person. Instead, minister Peter Weir seems to have kept his hand hovering over the same on/off switch hurriedly pulled back in March.
Weir has been widely accused of keeping schools open to save the 11-plus but contingency planning would have made sense here too: the department is perfectly free to issue one-off guidance on admissions criteria, instead of letting the unregulated system fall apart.
Rather than Machiavellian plotting for the grammar lobby, the minister and his officials appear to have been frozen in the headlights.
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The DUP has only one sustainable option on the Brexit outcome, sea border included: promote it and own it. This was probably too much for hope for in the final week of the UK’s departure but the depth of the DUP’s denial still left other parties agog during trade deal debates at Westminster and Stormont. Blaming everyone except itself for a form of Brexit it directly caused is a stance it could take the DUP years to back out of at the usual pace of a classic Northern Ireland U-turn - and the time-frame is tighter than many realise. The next scheduled assembly election is just 17 months away. The MLAs it returns will decide the first Stormont vote to continue or reject the sea border, which the Withdrawal Agreement requires to be held four years from now. Does the DUP really want that election to turn into a de facto sea border poll?
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Northern Ireland’s universities will retain access to the EU’s Erasmus student exchange programme thanks to €2 million per year from the Irish government.
This is symbolically significant and could help attract fee-paying students from Britain but the coverage it has received has still been vastly out of proportion to the numbers and sums involved.
What has been keeping universities here awake at night is the risk Brexit poses to Horizon, the EU’s main research funding programme. This has been disbursing €40 million per year in Northern Ireland, bringing in matching funds, collaborative projects and an exchange of staff and postgraduate students that is the lifeblood of academia. The programme is also central to Stormont’s innovation strategy. Horizon runs in seven-year stretches and the UK has decided to stay for at least one more, up to 2027. But given the timescale of research, even that may not be a firm enough commitment to stop European partners slowly backing away.
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Not all Brexit problems are worth complaining about. Anyone entering Northern Ireland from Britain with €10,000 or more than in cash or cheques must now declare it, which can be done up to three days in advance on the HMRC website.
This new requirement made headlines but is a trivial nuisance compared to the money laundering regulations on withdrawing or depositing a similar sum in any UK bank, including to or from your own account. The legal threshold for banks to establish where money comes from are £10,000 or €15,000 but most will start demanding onerous proof at £5,000 and may refuse the transaction even then.
An HMRC declaration could actually make the process easier.
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The PSNI has said it will no longer tell taxi firms to close during Covid curfew hours but it has not explained how it got this wrong in the first place. The regulations are unambiguous: taxi firms are an “essential retail business” and curfew does not apply to such businesses providing a “transport service”.
There is no need for firms to check their passengers are engaged in essential travel - that is a matter between the traveller and any police officer who asks. The PSNI seems unclear on this too, saying it will still close taxi firms not operating “in an essential manner”.
The clue this is mistaken is that buses and trains, listed alongside taxis in the regulations, continue to run as normal during curfew hours without Translink staff having to quiz everyone getting on board.
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Brexit seemed to twin Northern Ireland with Kent, as we both acquired sea borders and internal UK frontiers (in the latter’s case the Kent Access Permit, or Kermit.)
Now that our debate on academic selection appears to be coming to a head, it feels worth noting that Kent is the only other part of the UK with an 11-plus and grammar system comparable in scale to our own, with a political controversy to match. Perhaps “as British as Finchley” could be changed to “as British as Kent”.
