Radio Ulster has not revealed the identity of the “senior DUP figure” who told it an Irish language act could be blocked until the Northern Ireland protocol is scrapped.
The DUP quickly insisted it is committed to language legislation.
The following day, Ian Paisley jnr warned that Westminster intervention on abortion “does not create a good atmosphere to allow for something as controversial as creating language acts”.
So he plainly has few qualms about undermining the party leadership on this issue.
Two weeks ago, leaked minutes from a South Antrim DUP constituency association showed the area’s MP, MLAs, councillors and members united on the need to pass and promote an Irish language act, while despairing at the leadership’s lack of control over Sammy Wilson.
It is remarkable how few representatives it takes to create the impression of a split.
The DUP is suffering serious damage from its inability to discipline two deeply unserious figures. Neither lead factions or have internal power bases, both are outside the Stormont centre of operations and their seats should be easily winnable by other DUP candidates. While it is no simple matter to get rid of an MP, only the weakest leadership should leave these two feeling untouchable.
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Secretary of state Brandon Lewis has been condemned after offering Stormont access to £100 million of New Decade, New Approach funding to help start the Troubles pension scheme, which is still stuck in an executive/Westminster standoff over who will pay for it.
The £100 million is supposed to be spent on legacy mechanisms, which will inevitably become an enormous boondoggle for lawyers, academics and activists. So there is something distasteful about the anger from those quarters about the money being offered to victims instead.
It was also tasteless for Lewis to make the offer without any consultation and announce it on twitter. He did so just as Reuters reported him saying Northern Ireland is “in a dangerous place” without unionist support for the sea border, which was viewed as a gaffe. It would have been even worse if his funding announcement had been viewed as a distraction.
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There was a quip in Yes, Minister that the Foreign Office “represents foreigners”.
That is apparently the case with the Shawcross report into victims of Libyan-sponsored IRA terrorism. The Foreign Office commissioned the 90-page report but will not publish it or reveal its recommendations. Author William Shawcross has been gagged with a confidentiality clause so tight he would not even reveal his terms of reference to a Westminster committee, where parliamentary privilege applies. Foreign office minister James Cleverly claims international law plus anarchy in Libya prevent using £12 billion of frozen Libyan assets to compensate victims, yet other countries have done so.
A far likelier explanation is that the UK wants to ingratiate itself with an emergent Libyan government, as a sort of apology for causing the anarchy in the first place by toppling Gaddafi’s regime a decade ago, alongside France, without a follow-up plan.
Unionists can console themselves that the Foreign Office regards Northern Ireland as fully British, or it would not be treating us all with such contempt.
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The climate change bill tabled at Stormont this week is a private member’s bill, from Green Party leader Clare Bailey, but it has the backing of every executive party except the DUP. This means the DUP cannot stop it with a petition of concern, as it would almost certainly like to do, because it lacks the numbers on its own or with the TUV.
Instead, DUP agriculture minister Edwin Poots is progressing a rival climate change bill with less ambitious emissions targets. If he gets this passed first, assembly technicalities might get Bailey’s bill quashed. Whatever happens, we are in for the bizarre spectacle of an ‘official’ executive bill from only one executive party competing with a ‘private’ bill from all the others.
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DUP MLA Trevor Clarke has been reported for multiple investigations after saying he “worked with a loyalist paramilitary organisation” to remove its flags, which was “welcomed by those who lived in the community.”
Clarke clearly expected praise for what he called “his leadership” but Sinn Féin MLA Liz Kimmins said it was “shocking” he had met with “armed loyalist criminal gangs”. She then reported him to the assembly’s standards commissioner, the PSNI and the Policing Board. The verdicts of these inquiries will be fascinating, given that engaging with paramilitaries to remove flags has been the policy of the PSNI, the executive and the councils since they adopted a police-led ‘protocol’ on it 16 years ago. Politicians have since ducked and weaved on the protocol but the PSNI has said its policy has not changed.
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Angela Wallace, president of teachers’ union the NASUWT in Northern Ireland, complained at length at its annual conference last weekend of teachers having to “grasp new areas of technology, assessment and learning” during lockdown.
Home learning would not have been new had any use ever been made of the online teaching equipment installed in all schools here a decade ago to serve children with long-term illnesses. But unions blocked it on spurious privacy grounds, with NASUWT the most persistent objector.
