At the end of a divisive week in Northern Ireland politics, where the agenda and mood were set by online rows, it must be asked how social media fits into our public conversation. This is a question without even the most basic answers, at least in the public domain.
Newspapers and broadcasters are known and measured quantities. Their distribution is independently audited and their audiences are exhaustively researched - by academia, officialdom and third-sector bodies, as well as by themselves.
Nothing comparable exists for the internet. The half-hopeful suspicion is that only a small number of unrepresentative cranks are driving discourse into the gutter but we simply do not know and the technology and psychology of social media will make it hard to find out. However, we need to try - not to censor or regulate, but to keep a perspective. Is this a society being trolled or a society of trolls? Politicians and journalists, addicted as they are to online engagement, are already overlooking that distinction.
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All hail our new secretary of state! Karen Bradley, like her predecessor James Brokenshire, is part of Theresa May’s extremely small inner circle from their time together at the Home Office - so it is good of the prime minister to spare her, considering how that circle keeps shrinking. A cabinet member since 2016, Bradley is best known for a bizarre Channel 4 News encounter last year with Labour’s Barry Gardiner, a plummy-voiced former Northern Ireland Office minister who has reinvented himself as an unlikely Corbynista.
Criticising the Tories for cutting 6.8 pence per pupil from school breakfast budgets, an emotional Gardiner turned to Bradley and shouted “how many cornflakes does 6.8 pence buy you Karen?”, causing audible off-camera giggling from the interviewer while Bradley struggled to keep a straight face. The clip became a viral sensation.
So while Bradley may never have set foot in Northern Ireland before taking up her new job, at least she is used to laughably trivial arguments.
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Two months ago, the RHI inquiry heard how Stormont officials brought in an expensive consultancy firm to cut and paste the heating scheme’s design from England - work civil servants could have done themselves - only for the firm to accidentally leave out crucial cost controls.
Now the inquiry has heard expensive specialist lawyers were brought in to cut and paste the scheme’s regulations from England, during which they noticed the cost controls had been left out and put them back in, only for civil servants to take them out again - twice - because they weren’t in the consultant’s report.
One lawyer told the inquiry that civil servants should have been doing his job instead, not only because they could but because they are supposed to, and energy officials in England refused to speak to him on this basis.
The final irony is that the entire point of bringing in consultants and lawyers is to cover civil service backsides when things go wrong.
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The RHI inquiry has not caused Stormont mandarins to keep a low profile. In the lingering limbo between devolution and direct rule, they are increasingly issuing routine and frankly needless statements under their own names. This week, for example, department of infrastructure permanent secretary Peter May has welcomed the ‘Northern Ireland Year of Infrastructure’ with two statements that can only be described as ministerial. It is a striking change for a layer of administration that used to take professional pride in its obscurity.
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On the other hand, Stormont civil servants can still be shy enough. Health charity the Nuffield Trust undertakes impartial, evidence-based NHS policy research. It has the sort of reputation that opens every door in Whitehall and this month it has organised an expert-led conference in Belfast, entitled: “Northern Ireland’s NHS: Learning from the past and preparing for the future.” Senior officials across the health sector were invited, including department of health permanent secretary Richard Pengelly - who wrote back to say attendance would be pointless as the department has already assessed its problems and prepared solutions. Pengelly copied the other invited officials into his email, ensuring they got the message.
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The National Trust has ordered a family-run gift shop out of its premises beside the Giant’s Causeway visitor’s centre (and gift shop.)
McConaghy’s Souvenirs has been trading for 71 years in a small one-storey building adjoining the Causeway Hotel. The National Trust, which holds the lease, says it needs the space for out-of-hours toilet facilities and a new toilet block would not be permitted because of the causeway’s UN World Heritage status.
Should a historical preservation society not have a longer memory? Just five years ago, the National Trust contested planning approval for a hotel and golf resort near the causeway on the grounds it would breach World Heritage Convention guidelines. It lost the case after a judge ruled that World Heritage status has no standing in UK law.
The visitor’s centre looks like a toilet block anyway.
newton@irishnews.com
