ARLENE Foster will escape questioning over the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme due to an unwritten Stormont convention.
The assembly’s watchdog public accounts committee, which is examining the £1 billion fiasco, will instead quiz Andrew McCormick, who was the top civil servant at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (Deti) when the scheme was set up. McCormick is doubly unfortunate because another unwritten convention is that only current permanent secretaries can be questioned, even about the work of their predecessors. Assembly members have long complained this allows senior civil servants to swap jobs and get out of harm’s way, given the further unwritten convention of Stormont inquiries taking 15 years. Deti has since been abolished and McCormick now heads the new Department for the Economy but the heat scheme still falls under his remit, so he must still take the flak. However, he will not take the fall. It is unheard of for permanent secretaries to suffer consequences over such matters.
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Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness have penned their first joint platform piece and been immediately panned for avoiding big issues. The basis of Sinn Féin and the DUP’s agreement is to stick this mandate out through thick and thin. So in a way, the less they agree to do, the more stable their arrangement becomes. They do need to do something though, so they have suddenly decided not to devolve regeneration powers to the new super-councils - the executive will need those powers if it wants credit for delivering most of the promises in the joint statement. This renders the decade of grief over local government reorganisation largely pointless. Belfast’s request for a Manchester-style city deal is also presumably doomed. The less Stormont Borough Council does, the more important it is not to be usurped.
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The TUV used to campaign under the slogan “nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.” It had to drop this after repeatedly keeping company with loyalists, despite damning the DUP for keeping company with republicans, which left moral unionists politically confused. Now party leader Jim Allister has expressed regret for sitting down with UDA and UVF representatives. “I sullied the clear line which I think should exist,” he told the News Letter. Allister then damned the DUP for keeping company with loyalists via the Social Investment Fund. Perhaps you only notice a line is sullied when you step back behind it.
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Assembly speaker Robin Newton (no relation) is refusing to disclose full details of his links to Charter NI, the east Belfast grant-seeking enterprise linked to the UDA. Asked by the Irish News if attending Charter NI board meetings and ‘volunteer celebration’ events was compatible with his role, an assembly spokesman said Newton is “still elected to represent a constituency.” Of course, that was not the question asked. Would the speaker let an assembly member away with such an answer?
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A transgender man has won a Belfast High Court case to have his former civil partnership, as a woman, kept off his marriage certificate. While this might look like an issue of sexual equality it is in fact a landmark advance in the right to privacy. The man argued he was distressed because marriage records are publicly accessible, even though they are never publicised. The judge agreed and his solution was to amend the marriage certificate to show the man was previously single. This ruling, which sets a legal precedent under the Human Rights Act, means a gender change is officially retrospective - or that it rewrites history, if you prefer. The implications of this are remarkable. Could you have public records changed if, say for religious reasons, you were distressed by people knowing you had been divorced?
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Chancellor Philip Hammond’s autumn statement means a £277 million windfall for Stormont’s capital budget over the rest of this assembly term. The A6 dualling and Yorkgate junction projects now look a lot more likely. But there will be more relief in the executive for what Hammond did not do. He did not reduce corporation tax to the lowest rate in the G20, as indicated by Theresa May, which would have undercut the Republic. Nor did he press on with welfare reform, which Stormont is only phasing in to its 2012 extent. Moves on either would have knocked out major pillars of the Fresh Start agreement.
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DUP education minister Peter Weir has begged the NASUWT teaching union to call off its strike next Wednesday as “there is no more money” and any extra he gives them will force schools to lay off staff. A typical teacher in Northern Ireland makes £40,000 a year.
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