Fresh Stormont talks already feel stale as it becomes clear the secretary of state’s February 7 ‘deadline’ is only a “milestone” - and hence no more written in stone that the year of deadlines before it.
Civil service chief David Sterling has attempted the inject some urgency back into the process, insisting there must be “budget certainty” by February 8. This was widely reported as meaning a budget must be in place by that date. Officials may well want information by then to begin preparations. However, the legal deadline for laying a draft budget before the assembly is March 14 and this does not have to be passed until March 27. Among the distractions already scheduled before then - to say nothing of unforeseen events - are the second round of Brexit negotiations and a by-election in West Tyrone.
On the plus side, whatever Sinn Féin decides to do about the talks, it can portray its guaranteed West Tyrone landslide as an endorsement.
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London and Dublin are being surprisingly gnomic over how talks are chaired.
Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney was standing beside the secretary state when talks were announced and his team has full access to Parliament Buildings, the talks venue - much to the annoyance of TUV leader Jim Allister, who accused the DUP and UUP of surrendering devolution. However, nobody is describing Coveney as a co-chair, despite the precedent of the 2006 St Andrews talks, which were co-chaired by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern. Nor has an independent chair, another nationalist demand, been appointed.
Does British-Irish cooperation to downplay British-Irish cooperation still count as British-Irish cooperation?
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The DUP and UUP did not rise to Allister’s bait, illustrating how important it is during a period of negotiation to hear the dogs that do not bark.
Nowhere is this more true than on air, where parties wishing to avoid a fight simply do not turn up - although in the DUP’s case, certain representatives may still appear, requiring their precise spot on the leadership to comedian spectrum to be carefully noted.
Alas, airtime must still be filled, so politicians are substituted for argumentative guests and things end up sounding far worse than they are.
“It is thoroughly awful listening to the same, failed politicians spewing tirades of garbage on local political shows,” tweeted Sinn Féin former minister Chris Hazzard on Monday morning as Radio Ulster got the week underway.
While the real politicians are in hiding, it is also largely inevitable.
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In other non-barking dog news, the PSNI has let it be known its new Paramilitary Crime Taskforce - a joint effort with HM Revenue and Customs and the National Crime Agency - is targeting a “dirty dozen” of well-known paramilitary leaders. Reports named the eight loyalists and four republicans in question but the east Belfast UVF remains conspicuous by its absence.
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Northern Ireland’s Planning Appeals Commission has approved the north-south electricity interconnector, removing the final obstacle to its construction - although this is meaningless, according to Sinn Féin. A statement in the name of Monaghan MEP Matt Carthy baldly declares that the pylons “will not be constructed” because they lack “the necessary public acceptance among the affected communities” and “without that public acceptance the project will not be completed.”
This unique Sinn Féin planning system would rule out Belfast’s new Casement Park stadium, so we may assume it has some sort of north-south disconnection.
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BBC Spotlight has uncovered a lackadaisical defence of Bombardier by the UK government. Despite proclaiming it would do all it could to protect 4,000 Belfast jobs from a Boeing trade dispute, London told US authorities it is not a “legally proper party” to the row and only submitted a four-page report to a key Washington hearing. There must be suspicions that Brexit makes London even more supine than usual towards America, yet the DUP-Tory deal requires it to pretend otherwise.
A low point in London’s dealings was telling Washington it could not supply information by a statutory deadline because Stormont officials had disappeared for the Twelfth fortnight.
Putting your time off before other people’s jobs is very much Stormont’s workplace culture, although ironically the same is true of Bombardier. In 2015, much to the horror of their trade union, 80 per cent of the Belfast plant’s workers rejected a pay freeze and extra hour in the week designed to save 20 per cent of jobs - which were duly lost.
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It seems I spoke too soon last week in declaring the Northern Ireland Events Company saga to be over. Although directors of the collapsed quango have accepted disqualifications, the Belfast Telegraph reports a decision remains pending on criminal prosecutions - one year after police sent a file to the Public Prosecution Service, two years after the Public Accounts Committee found probable “fraud on a grand scale” and ten years after the company folded. If there is a fraud trial, that could easily take another ten years.
newton@irishnews.com
