The DUP’s Windsor Framework split is healing, leaving only some rather comically wounded pride, as the party’s Westminster awkward squad accepts the world has moved on.
Sammy Wilson has offered firm backing to leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, despite “reservations about some of the things that the party has agreed with the government”. The East Antrim MP has also refused to attend a meeting against the sea border in Carrickfergus and criticised organisers Jim Allister and Jamie Bryson for dividing unionism.
South Antrim DUP MP Paul Girvan did attend such a meeting last weekend but condemned it afterwards for “vindictive” attacks on his party. He looks absurd for apparently not realising this would happen.
Although more problems are emerging with the Windsor Framework on plants and pets, Ian Paisley has not repeated or followed through – as far as we know – on his threat in the Commons last month to smuggle banned items into Northern Ireland and “dear help the official who tries to stop me”.
This is almost a pity. It would be something we could all enjoy.
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The Department of Education says it cannot guarantee funding for the Strule shared education campus in Omagh. Good. ‘Shared education’ is a terrible idea, the opposite of integration. Segregation on the same site is almost worse than segregation out of sight, being a constant reminder of enforced separation.
The Strule proposal is a particularly terrible model, with six self-contained schools side by side. More recent schemes share more facilities. The ballooning £340 million cost would sap the schools budget for the rest of this decade, denying repairs and rebuilds everywhere else. One school has been completed at Strule, the Arvalee special school, and that should be the end of it.
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Stormont has landed itself with another construction problem by failing to update the law. Owners of apartments in Belfast’s Victoria Square have had a £25m claim against the builders and architects thrown out because structural defects did not appear until 2019, 11 years after completion. The legal deadline to make such claims is six years.
In 2022, Westminster extended the same deadline in England and Wales to 30 years and made it retrospective. Other aspects of this law apply to Northern Ireland, so while the executive has only been back for a month it is not unreasonable to expect it to notice the need for a longer deadline and to act promptly.
Victoria Square’s apartment block is a large, complex building on a challenging city centre site. The 30 private owners and one housing charity affected cannot possibly afford to repair or demolish it, as reportedly may be necessary. If their claim is not revived, the taxpayer will end up sorting out the mess, one way or another.
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Is Sinn Féin trying to cause trouble at Belfast City Council? Last week, the DUP sidestepped a row over lighting City Hall for the Irish president’s birthday. This week, Sinn Féin hosted the National Graves Association’s ‘Easter Lily launch’ in a public function room, rather than in party offices as in previous years.
Of course, republicans argue their Easter commemorations are comparable to Remembrance Day. But Sinn Féin did not bother having that argument – the DUP claims it just took over the room. This looks like baiting. It is doubly hard for the DUP not to take the bait with the TUV goading it from the opposite direction.
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This is the first St Patrick’s jamboree in Washington with an executive in place since the appointment of Joe Kennedy III as US special economic envoy, so attention is turning to the promise of American investment.
The dangers of American investment are worth bearing in mind. Harland and Wolff has returned to naval shipbuilding in Belfast thanks to a loan from a New York venture capital fund at 9 per cent above base rate. The fund gets the company if the loan is not repaid.
Last year, the government effectively guaranteed this loan by making creative use of a scheme to help exporters. In the Commons this week, Labour’s former shadow defence minister asked the chancellor if this constituted a “backdoor bailout”.
In reality, it is all legitimate but the ruthless Americans have extracted minimum risk for maximum reward as usual. This has exposed Harland and Wolff to potentially damaging criticism from politicians and competitors.
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The first and deputy first ministers have addressed the Ireland Funds annual gala in Washington, with Emma Little-Pengelly saying: “We stand here tonight, Irish and Ulster-Scots, representing the two great traditions of our island.”
This sentiment was well-meant and well-received but it did overlook the third tradition on this part of our island – Ulster-English (or should that be Anglo-Ulster?)
As an Anglo-Ulsterman, I do not know which is worse: being told I am really Irish by Sinn Féin or being told I am really Scottish by the DUP.
As an Anglo-Ulsterman, I do not know which is worse: being told I am really Irish by Sinn Féin or being told I am really Scottish by the DUP
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Sinn Féin infrastructure minister John O’Dowd has recruited more examiners to deal with the MOT backlog. He has also asked his officials to examine policy options, including biennial testing, as proposed by the SDLP in the assembly on Monday and backed by all other parties.
In a statement announcing this, O’Dowd added “there are no simple fixes and I will have to consider the impacts of these options carefully”.
While it is usually true there are no simple fixes, biennial testing is an exception. It would be straightforward to implement, is common around the world (and compatible with EU law) and would immediately double capacity.
Among the countries with biennial testing is the Republic of Ireland, making O’Dowd’s reticence a rather unusual case of Sinn Féin partitionism.
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Last week’s referendum results in the Republic have shocked the political establishment and will have implications in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin supporters were the most likely to reject the proposed constitutional amendments, according to an exit poll, so the party will be rethinking its progressive positioning. It will also have to rethink its stance on citizen’s assemblies, which were used to concoct the defeated referendum proposals.
Journalists as well as politicians might have felt the ground shifting beneath their feet. The exit poll was commissioned by the Sunday Independent, which declared on its front page that the results had been “summarised by the OpenAI tool ChatGPT, overseen by the Sunday Independent’s editors, providing a detailed and comprehensive insight into why both referendums failed”.