When considering the reopening of schools, it is important to distinguish between teachers and their unions, between individual unions and between leadership factions within unions. Non-teaching staff are under even firmer union orders not to return to work, despite many being off without pay.
So reports of union outrage, after DUP education minister Peter Weir confirmed a partial reopening of schools from August 17, are a simplification.
The National Association of Head Teachers, a union, is concerned that Weir has not issued clear guidance on employment contracts to all unions.
Head teachers know that if the comrades are not put firmly in their box, they will try to stop any return to work during the summer holidays - something most teachers are perfectly willing to do.
Alas, Stormont is even worse at standing up to trade unionists than at standing up to unionists. Two months ago, at the start of lockdown, Weir offered the teaching unions a substantial backdated pay rise to settle a long-standing dispute. Now they have him over a barrel.
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Sinn Féin finance minister Murphy has claimed lockdown would not have been necessary if “years of austerity” had not reduced the capacity of the health system.
Murphy later issued a ‘clarification’ that simply repeated his point in a more roundabout fashion.
This was a typical Sinn Féin attempt to blame Tory pantomime villains for everything. However, it was an unwitting reminder that the original purpose of lockdown was not to reduce coronavirus cases, let alone eradicate them, but merely to spread them out to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed. In the event, there was no capacity problem in hospitals, yet fear of it passed the epidemic into nursing homes.
As we exit lockdown and face a possible second peak, we need to recognise the idea of what lockdown is for has significantly changed.
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Nichola Mallon is managing more coordination across the UK and Ireland than the government can manage in Britain.
The SDLP transport minister has had discussions with her counterparts in Dublin and Edinburgh about mandatory face masks on cross-border and cross-channel journeys.
When UK transport minister Grant Shapps was asked what people should do on trains from England bound for Scotland or Wales, he suggested they carry a face mask and put them on at the border.
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As the Troubles pensions row rumbles on, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood has written to the leaders of the four other executive parties requesting an urgent meeting of the Leaders Forum.
This is the first real mention of the forum since it was created under January’s New Decade, New Approach deal. It was supposedly a central new structure to prevent recurrence of the breakdown in relations that caused Stormont’s three-year collapse. Meetings were to be held monthly at a minimum, attended by each party leader or their permanently nominated representative, plus a deputy representative. The idea was to create an informal “safe space” to anticipate or address problems and nip them in the bud. A review of its usefulness was scheduled “after six months”, which is now a month away. It looks safe to draw a conclusion on that already, as Sinn Féin and the DUP have clearly bypassed the forum with their own informal arrangement,
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The website of Britain’s Metro newspaper has gone to town on what must be an obscure story for most of its readers: a DUP councillor in Ballymena making a Facebook post blaming coronavirus on God’s wrath over abortion and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.
Could this be penance for Metro’s print edition taking the DUP’s infamous £282,000 wrap-around Brexit ad? It is certainly not gratitude.
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Two PSNI officers have been charged and three others spoken to after shots were accidentally fired during a house party in Dunmurry. Standards have certainly fallen. In my day, police officers lived in Hillsborough.
At least nobody shot themselves in the foot, unlike chief constable Simon Byrne, who has withdrawn a plan to abbreviate “Northern Ireland” in the force’s logo and remove the words from its crest.
The PSNI has enough problems dealing with other people’s needless, predictable arguments over symbols without starting one of its own.
One reason the rebranding was dropped is that the PSNI’s name and the design of its crest are specified in legislation, which was painstakingly negotiated and could not have been changed by Byrne’s proposed consultation exercise, as justice minister Naomi Long pointed out. Presumably, the chief constable was spoken to.
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Northern Ireland appears mercifully free from statues and memorials to supporters of slavery, with the exception of a statue of a Protestant Young Irelander in Newry - a somewhat confounding source of cross-community embarrassment.
For redemption, we can all look just around the coast to Rostrevor’s Ross Memorial. This honours General Robert Ross, who burned down the White House during the War of 1812 in alliance with Native Americans and escaped former slaves.
If any objection to him can still be found, it would not be in the least surprising.
