ANemergency meeting of the British-Irish Council to address Brexit has drawn wider attention to the council itself. Until now it has been the stranded strand of the Good Friday Agreement - a pointless east-west body to avoid having only north-south and devolved bodies. Where else could the President of the Policy and Resources Committee of Guernsey be on a par with the Taoiseach, or Stormont be granted responsibility for transport, housing and “spatial planning” across Britain and Ireland (like the DUP’s tunnel to Scotland, for example?) But with EU and non-EU members, UK and non-UK members, is it a putative cocoon for transforming the Islands we call ‘These’? A further point in the council’s favour as Scotland grows restive is that its permanent base is in Edinburgh. Expect to hear more of this for years and years.
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A two-month sting operation by a Sunday newspaper has revealed that UUP MLA Ross Hussey is a single man who arranges blind dates on the internet, like just about every other single person in the Western world. The paper’s justification for this story is that Hussey could be putting himself and other members of the Policing Board at risk through “criminal blackmail” or “meeting a terrorist”. Yet the only reason for a consenting adult to fear blackmail over their lawful conduct is if it might be salaciously published. As for meeting terrorists, is that not what the Policing Board is for?
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Belfast has been ranked the fourth most ‘cost effective’ city in the UK for students in a survey by the Royal Bank of Scotland. However, the survey disregarded course fees because only one in 50 prospective undergraduates said they had considered fee levels when deciding where to study, despite their wide variation across the UK. With a row brewing at Stormont over putting fees up, it might be worth finding out how much young people here actually care about the issue before reaching for the smelling salts.
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In Northern Ireland, uniquely in the UK and Ireland, it is an offence to have information about a serious crime and not to pass it to the police within a reasonable time. The penalty is the same as for the offence being concealed. This 1967 law is rarely used but awareness of it has grown due to historical child abuse scandals. The PSNI has now brought three charges of not passing on information over the sectarian murder of Paul McCauley, assaulted in Derry in 2006 by a loyalist mob. The accused is a man in England, who has never been to Northern Ireland and who allegedly gleaned his knowledge of the murder in Scotland. At a court hearing in Derry this week he failed to have the charges thrown out. This is a fascinating extension of the 1967 law’s power. Its potential in Troubles cases seems almost limitless.
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The impenetrable infighting in the Labour party has reached south Armagh, where Merseyside MP Conor McGinn grew up. McGinn has accused party leader Jeremy Corbyn of “bullying” him by threatening to call his dad, who used to be a Sinn Féin councillor. Among the many reasons people are struggling to take this seriously is that McGinn went public by tweeting: “I’ve known Jeremy for over a decade. Respect him and worked for him. But I can’t tolerate his hypocrisy any longer.” One thing everyone agrees on about Corbyn it is that he has had exactly the same views and methods for 40 years. If you can tolerate him for a decade, why stop now?
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Begging in Northern Ireland is against the law. The PSNI reported earlier this year that most beggars in Belfast are foreign nationals who are not homeless and who travel here solely to beg. So it is no surprise that Kingsway shopping centre in Dunmurry has put up signs in English, Polish and Romanian, warning police will be called for “begging and loitering”. Patrick Yu of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities says this is “discrimination” and should be referred to the Equality Commission, potentially landing another gay cake-type conundrum on its desk. If you are going to report people to the police, could it not also be discrimination to fail to warn them in the only language they may understand?
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If you are wondering what happened to the gay cake case you are not thinking on a legal time scale. Judgment on the bakery’s appeal was reserved on May 12, with Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan saying it would be given “as soon as possible”. Sadly that does not seem to have been possible by the end of ‘Trinity Term’, which this year ran from April 4 to June 30. The courts are now on holiday until September 4, the start of ‘Michaelmas Term’, so perhaps a verdict will emerge before the new year, which marks the start of ‘Hillary Term’. As for who will win, my money is on Gryffindor.
newton@irishnews.com
