“We don’t have a lot of levers left to pull,” was how Stormont’s chief scientific adviser, Ian Young, explained the latest Covid restrictions.
Evidence used to devise those restrictions was published this week by the Department of Health. It showed most closures, such as of bars, restaurants and hairdressers, will have a low to moderate impact on infection but a high impact on people losing their incomes. Stormont says it all adds up and this is its only option, apart from a full lockdown.
Another option would be finding alternative levers. If small impacts are good enough, it cannot be impossible to identify more and prevent future ‘circuit breakers’ targeting the same few industries again and again.
A bitter irony for Northern Ireland’s hospitality trade is that this is the year opening hours for licensed premises are to be finally, slightly liberalised, after a century of religious obstruction by unionists and a decade of health-and-safety obstruction by the SDLP.
A liquor licensing modernisation bill was presented to the assembly this Monday by Sinn Féin and waved through its first stage without a vote or even one word of debate.
Having just discussed the Covid closure of pubs and restaurants, MLAs could not bring themselves to grandstand on the issue.
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What are we to make the statement from Edwin Poots, issued through the DUP, that he was making a political and not a sectarian point when comparing infection rates in nationalist and unionist areas because “at no time did I attribute the spread of Covid-19 to religion”?
It feels like an argument the late Ian Paisley would have called ‘Jesuitical’.
Poots might cite in his defence the late Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich’s timeless observation that Protestants are religious bigots and Catholics are political bigots. On the other hand, that could as easily be cited against him.
In the equally timeless tradition of themmuns started it, perhaps the question should be turned around.
Since the start of the epidemic, unionists have been accused of killing people by stupidly following the UK, blocking all-Ireland cooperation, causing border clusters and giving Northern Ireland worse figures than the Republic, all of which has turned out to be baseless.
Was that sectarian?
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Edwin Poots, who is agriculture and environment minister, is about to suffer further embarrassment.
A draft climate change bill has been presented to the assembly by Green leader Clare Bailey, with the backing of every other party except the DUP.
In June, Poots dismissed a Sinn Féin motion to pass a climate bill within three months, saying the time-frame was “ridiculous”. The UUP argued for more time, causing the motion to fail. Yet here a draft is four months later, with UUP leader Steve Aiken making a point of attending its launch. Although the bill is still far from passed an ambush has clearly been mounted. The DUP might end up with no way to block it other than a petition of concern, which could trigger a political crisis. The New Decade, New Approach deal promised executive action on climate change and an end to abuse of the petition of concern.
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Brexit is still happening, for those still interested. The government had declared a mid-October deadline for trade talks, earlier than the EU’s early November deadline, requiring theatrics this week as both sides pretended to stomp on and off the stage. None of this prevented progress on the Northern Ireland protocol, including a deal for EU customs inspectors to work here without having an office, plus discussions on reducing paperwork for Northern Ireland firms and UK supermarkets.
Whether the play-acting from London or Brussels is about deal or no deal, talks or no talks, law-breaking bill or no bill, preparations for the sea border continue.
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Sinn Féin has been accused of partitionism after telling the Republic’s standards commission it operates on “a six and 26-county basis”.
The record-breaking €4m bequest it received last year from an English recluse vastly exceeded the Republic’s limit for private donations but no such limit applies in Northern Ireland, where the gift was subsequently registered.
The mockery this has generated, plus more serious questions in Dublin about leaks in the system, have all distracted from the point that Sinn Féin’s explanation is in error.
Party president Mary Lou McDonald told the commission “the donation that you refer to was not offered to, or accepted by, the Sinn Féin party in the 26-county jurisdiction”.
Yet the donor’s will names as its beneficiary “the political party in the Republic of Ireland known at this time as Sinn Féin.”
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The Irish Mail on Sunday has reported that Osama Bin Laden’s son, Omar, a fan of the folk song ‘Carrickfergus’, visited the town last Summer.
“He went up into the tower of the castle and watched as one of the staff there used an old-style crossbow to demonstrate how the castle was defended in times past,” a friend recalled.
This is an extraordinary image of the sweep and circle of history: the castle was built by the Normans, who led the crusades, which were defeated by Saladin, to whom Bin Laden senior repeatedly compared himself.
Perhaps it would have been clearer on the Knight Ride.
