DUP claims of securing another £1 billion for Northern Ireland in the latest UK budget are about as credible as the party’s threat last month to vote against the budget. Although more money is coming and that should be welcomed, one third of it is an automatic consequence of spending rises in England and another third is unspent funds rolled over from the Fresh Start agreement. The final third is for a Belfast city deal, which is mentioned in the DUP-Tory confidence and supply agreement but which has been too long in the works for the DUP to take sole credit.
However, the real proof the DUP’s budget bluff has been called is that chancellor Philip Hammond paid fulsome tribute to DUP MPs during his Commons statement. In Westminster, that is how you really know you have been stuffed.
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Sinn Féin former finance minister Máirtín Ó Muilleoir has been ridiculed for criticising the budget, having notoriously failed to produce a budget himself. An even stranger line of attack is the party’s claim that school funding shortfalls, a growing political issue, are the fault of the “DUP-Tory deal”. As with similar shortfalls across the public sector, the problem is the collapse of Stormont - there is enough money available but no ministers to allocate it. Stormont fell six months before the DUP-Tory deal and Sinn Féin was willing to restore it in February without any changes to the deal. February’s agreement failed when the DUP got cold feet over Irish language legislation. Anyone who thinks the Tories had a hand in that is wearing a tin-foil hat. It would make more sense to blame the Orange Order, as it told the DUP no Irish language act was acceptable.
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Revelations at the RHI inquiry have not given the Northern Ireland Civil Service pause for thought over its annual awards ceremony, now in its fourth year and hence hardly an ancient tradition.
With 620 nominees in 10 categories, the event should at least provide a fitting tribute to civil service practices. An enormous number of people are going to have to sit around for ages to hear a few vacuous announcements.
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The family of IRA murder victim Robert McCartney has rejected a Police Ombudsman’s finding that the PSNI conducted a proper investigation and was not “protecting” informers.
Coverage of this issue should not overlook the family’s longer-standing concern with the Public Prosecution Service (PPS), which it accused three years of ago of having never been interested in bringing “substantial charges.”
Unfortunately, there is no equivalent of the ombudsman for the PPS - a glaring omission in our otherwise elaborate system of policing and justice oversight.
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The PPS will not be prosecuting former Sinn Féin MP Barry McElduff over his Kingsmill loaf video - an unsurprising decision but badly timed for party president Mary Lou McDonald, already facing internal questions over last week’s presidential election. In January, Sinn Féin’s Dublin leadership publicly overruled Belfast colleagues to insist on McElduff’s resignation. This happened during the week of McDonald’s final selection as Gerry Adams’s successor and was seen as sending a strong signal about her intended direction. But many republicans feel this went too far and they will take the PPS decision as confirmation, while many others feel the momentum of January’s message has not been maintained. It all adds to the sense from the election that McDonald is alienating hardliners without reaching beyond them.
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Citizens Advice Northern Ireland has collapsed under a mountain of debt, following a modernisation programme that seemed to forget its frontline staff are volunteers. The charity tried to centralise its operations around a fancy Belfast headquarters, with advice dispensed by phone rather than face to face. Such an approach might pare down wage costs in a call centre but it simply added IT costs to Citizens Advice, while driving away volunteers whose motivation was helping people face to face.
The ensuing fiasco reveals a lot about what is going wrong with the charity sector, where professional management sees its role as applying ruthless business practices to people offering their time for free.
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In what was perhaps the first book launch in history where questions were not accepted from the media, Gerry Adams has launched his Negotiators Cookbook - and changed his story. In August, when the book was announced, Adams said its premise was recipes that sustained republicans during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, because “the British never fed us.”
At the launch he said the British were “reluctant to feed us”.
In fact, lavish canteen facilities were provided to all talks participants by the Northern Ireland Office - a British government department - and the Sinn Féin team is on record as availing of them.
Perhaps Adams will get to the truth after a few dozen reprints.
newton@irishnews.com
