TRADE unions have challenged the Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, about the failure to provide public sector pay increases this year.
While intervening in other devolved issues, including the appointment of an interim chief constable, he has steadfastly taken the position that he has no authority to negotiate public sector pay increases as it is a devolved matter. Thus we have had the scenario that public sector workers here have been treated less favourably than those in Britain.
Media reports suggest that Stormont civil servant departments have been advised to prepare for the return of the NI assembly and executive in the coming weeks. If it does occur, it will be accompanied by a budgetary injection that will allow the executive to meet public sector pay awards and other cost of living pressures. This will be sold as an achievement of the DUP when all it will really do is restore some sort of parity with Britain for the same work. The DUP will be depicted as those who have rescued us from these ills rather than those who brought the situation about.
The idea is that it will send a message to people here that you are better off with a functioning executive than without one. You are being held to ransom deliberately by the British government that if you don’t endorse a Stormont regime you will be worse off. It really is time to prevent British politicians that have no mandate here from blackmailing the people of the six counties.
A Stormont assembly is not a political solution because it is always circumscribed by British government policies that has real day-to-day impact on the wellbeing of people living here.
Voting for an assembly or executive may have a short term immediate impact but it will leave the population continually open to the vagaries of British government policy. The only way to permanently prevent that is through constitutional change.
Seán O’Fiach
Belfast BT11
Money spent on our divided society could be better used
THE DUP is a minority among Stormont MLAs. It is not democratic for it to prevent those elected by the voters of all the other parties from carrying out their mandates.
Every day there are reports of more and more problems which affect us all. Public sector employees are not having pay increases in line with those in other parts of the UK. Lough Neagh is dying from pollution but we do not have an Environmental Protection Agency. People moving on to Universal Credit are not getting the UK-wide benefits they are entitled to. NHS reforms approved years ago are not being implemented. Hospital waiting lists keep growing.
Civil servants are being expected to make political decisions. Education budgets fall far short of what our children and students need.
Most of all, the Stormont Assembly should be tackling the sectarianism which still plagues Northern Ireland. The money spent financing our divided society would be more than enough to cover the shortfalls in our budget. It is reckoned that the overall extra costs of our divided society are between £400,000 million and £830,000 million per year – more than enough to make good many of the budget cuts.
At present the ordinary people of both Israel and Gaza are suffering horrendously, but here in Northern Ireland support for one side or the other is divided according to our sectarian backgrounds.
Margaret Marshall
Belfast BT8
Now is the time to sew international peace
UNICEF officials told the UN Security Council emergency meeting that “more than 420 children are being killed or injured in Gaza every day”.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted the Bible to justify Israeli military actions in Gaza: “The Bible says there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war.”
There are many versions of the Bible, and the truth of its messages are often lost in translations or manipulations. Ecclesiastes 3:7-8 has one such version: “There is a time to tear apart and a time to sew together. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak. There is a time to love and a time to hate. There is a time for war and a time for peace.”
It’s not the first time that religion and religious beliefs have been misused to justify the unjustifiable. The Middle East and the wider world is being torn apart at present by unjustified wars. In this 21st century of weapons of mass destruction, no war is justifiable and throughout history wars were never justifiable when peace by peaceful means should always have been possible.
Now is the time to sew international peace back together. Now is the time to speak out against war crimes. Now is the time to show love and never to hate. There should never be a time for war. The risk of nuclear war was never greater. If it happens there will be no future. Planet Earth will be uninhabitable.
Edward Horgan
Castletroy, Co Limerick
Farming community left feeling depressed
OUR farming sector has been getting quite a battering of late, but sure what’s new about that. We got the blame for the Lough Neagh problems this past month. We are the culprits when it comes to climate change. We have the cattle TB disease/eradication debacle.
Now to top it all our public broadcaster, the BBC, is reportedly planning to cancel us from the airwaves by cutting out Good Morning Ulster’s Farm Gate. This early morning, three-minute slot was really all we have left in farming media
coverage. We can well feel we are a tarnished, contaminated sector. We can still produce brilliant food sustainably, but the powers that be still are not happy.
Pat McKay
South Down
