Peter Robinson is all tactics and no strategy, which is how his brinkmanship ended up going over the brink. Each step the DUP leader took during the past two weeks to triangulate himself between the UUP and Sinn Fein made sense on its own but taken together they carried him too far. Naturally, the master tactician had packed a parachute, in the form of a resignation that turned into seven days notice of a resignation with a non-resigning colleague minding his seat. But as he stood before the media in Stormont’s Great Hall and pulled the rip-cord on this life or death contrivance, its canopy seemed to open and immediately transform into an enormous pair of comedy bloomers. Tactically, he should still land in one piece. Strategically, no-one will ever take his threats to jump seriously again.
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In his penultimate step up to the cliff edge, Peter Robinson responded to a UUP boycott of the talks with a DUP boycott of the executive to concentrate on the talks. Announcing this on Monday, he also warned of further developments in the murder of Kevin McGuigan. After Wednesday’s arrest of three ‘senior republicans’, including Sinn Fein northern chair Bobby Storey, Robinson tweeted this was what he had “predicted”. He then called for the assembly to adjourn - his last step before the fateful demand for suspension - while chiding the UUP for not supporting adjournment the week before. So how had the DUP leader planned ahead with such detail and laid a trap for the UUP with such confidence, given that a police tip-off would have been most inappropriate? Martin McGuinness’s reaction to the arrests was merely to say he was “surprised”, which was itself surprising, given that Robinson was not surprised. Or perhaps none of this is surprising in the slightest.
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With even Sinn Fein declining to blame securocrats, shadowy forces, enemies of the peace process and so on we may put another paranoid notion to rest. The DUP cannot have been trying to adjourn or suspend Stormont to stop the finance committee’s inquiry into the Nama allegations. Assembly committees are not affected by adjournment and can continue during suspension, which the Sinn Fein chair of the finance committee would certainly have sought to do in that unlikely eventuality. If Peter Robinson had hopes of denying a Stormont platform to anyone, it was Mike Nesbitt in the assembly chamber.
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Belfast City Council managers have been planning for some time to outsource running the Ulster Hall, the Waterfront Hall and the new conference centre. The council’s trade unions recently came together to devise a compromise that would defer privatisation for two years while in-house performance was assessed. But alas the comrades asked west Belfast People Before Profit councillor Gerry Carroll to propose this in committee, causing Sinn Fein to raise a motion that privatisation be ruled out forever, which then inevitably failed before Carroll’s amendment could be discussed. Jobs will now be outsourced immediately because Sinn Fein is so scared of being outflanked on the left that it would rather win a doomed posture than share credit for success. Carroll is expected to run for Stormont, which is why this council control-freakery looks so out of proportion.
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Homeless charity the Simon Community is paid to run a number of sex offender hostels around Northern Ireland but it will only house the most serious category of paedophile in its Portadown site, which it is currently planning to expand. The charity has so far declined to explain this policy to residents in the densely-populated Portadown neighbourhood but it may not be a coincidence that the hostel is beside the town’s police station. Among the many reasons why such a final safeguard might not be acknowledged is that the PSNI is planning to move.
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Stormont’s cross-party education committee has expressed alarm at the spiralling cost of school uniforms but has neglected to point out the obvious solution. Under education department guidelines, schools cannot require uniform purchases from particular suppliers, while primary schools have no legal power to impose a uniform of any kind. So parents can simply ignore these petty rules from minor state functionaries and demand that the public service they are paying for be provided regardless. Would Stormont politicians have a problem with that kind of thinking?
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Lough Neagh is not the largest freshwater lake in Europe, Rathcoole is not the biggest housing estate in Europe and the M2/M5 foreshore is not the widest motorway in Europe. Yet BBC Northern Ireland has added another dodgy legend to this list, prominently claiming in all publicity for its new House of Cars reality series that the Charles Hurst dealership on Belfast’s Boucher Road is “the largest car lot in Europe”. How was this remarkable assertion quantified? Is there a European car lot almanac? Was every dealer in the continent surveyed? Did someone scroll through Google Earth for months while holding a ruler up to the screen?
newton@irishnnews.com
