Can dual-market Donaldson square Sammy’s circle?

In a new year message to DUP members, leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson says his aim this year is “safeguarding our place in the UK internal market both now and for the future, whilst retaining our access to the EU single market. These objectives are not mutually exclusive”.

This has caused some dissent within unionism and his own party. DUP MP Sammy Wilson told the News Letter: “You can have pure access to the EU market and compromised access to the UK market”, or vice versa, “but you can’t have both. It’s as simple as that.”

Of course, Northern Ireland can have access to both if the UK rejoins the EU single market or agrees some form of alignment with the same effect. Donaldson could square Wilson’s circle by backing Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s goal of an EU association agreement. The DUP would not even have to recant on Brexit: Starmer has no intention of rejoining the EU.

It seems Donaldson is now inching towards this escape route with his usual abundance of caution, trying not to antagonise hardliners who will never be happy regardless and squandering the opportunity to decisively change the game.

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Northern Ireland had 71 road deaths in 2023, an annual increase of 19 per cent and the highest total since 2015. There were also 700 serious injuries. These figures, described by the PSNI as “simply horrific”, mirror trends across the world. Budget cuts to road safety policing and advertising here cannot be blamed.

We have spent much of the eight years since the EU referendum discussing regulation of goods, yet rarely think of deaths involving cars as an issue of a dangerous consumer product.

While Northern Ireland cannot determine vehicle manufacturing standards on its own, the same is true of most products for even large countries. Public and political opinion still would not accept any other domestic appliance that could prove so lethal in routine use. Why are cars different?

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Victims commissioner Ian Jeffers, who is stepping down, has made a parting recommendation that payments be made to the immediate relatives of every Troubles fatality.

An identical proposal sank the 2009 Eames-Bradley report, or perhaps more accurately was used to sink it. Authors Lord Eames and Denis Bradley considered the payment to be only a minor part of their report, mirroring a scheme in the Republic.

Another debate on the subject is almost certainly futile and hence needlessly cruel, as the DUP will not agree to a scheme that includes the families of terrorists and Sinn Féin will not agree to a scheme that excludes them.

Victims group SEFF has suggested payments could be issued to the 85 per cent of uncontentious cases ahead of the issue of eligibility being resolved.

However, Sinn Féin will struggle to see this as a compromise. By far the most probable outcome is that payments will never be issued to anybody.

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The Construction Employers Federation, the trade body for Northern Ireland’s building trade, has submitted 10 proposals to Stormont’s revenue-raising review.

The most significant is mutualisation of NI Water and the Housing Executive, enabling them to borrow privately to invest. Mutualisation is akin to the ownership structure once used by building societies.

Explaining the difference between this and privatisation could become a major issue in our politics, a prospect that might once have seemed arcane but which now looks like light entertainment after years of debating the technicalities of shipping paperwork.

Even more entertaining is the federation’s proposal for road tolls. Most Stormont parties will be aghast at such an unpopular suggestion and most motorists mistakenly believe they pay ‘road tax’ already. Can Sinn Féin reject a policy out of hand that has been used with great success in the Republic?

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The Irish government has been mocked for suggesting Cork could have a metro rail system within 15 years. Experience in Dublin suggests even decades of determined planning would deliver nothing.

That did not stop border poll campaign group Ireland’s Future from seizing on the announcement and claiming Belfast could have a metro too, if only we lived in a united Ireland.

Belfast has the Glider instead of a tram and the Glider almost lost exclusive use of its bus lanes in part because Sinn Féin ministers keep giving in to lobbying by the taxi industry.

How would a united Ireland solve this? It seems likelier to make the problem worse.

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Perhaps the most remarkable and least remarked-upon fact to emerge from this year’s release of state papers is that half of all the petrol and diesel sold in Northern Ireland during the 1990s was smuggled in from the Republic.

This was plain to the authorities at the time, as official fuel imports halved while the number of vehicles increased. It raises the question of whether the Good Friday Agreement should have required paramilitaries to decommission their finances as well as their firearms. Stashes of either could be large enough to subvert democracy and the rule of law.

Because much of this wealth must have been put into property, there are also questions to be asked - even today - about political conflicts of interest in the housing market.

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The Irish News is joining the Belfast Telegraph in legal action challenging a law that grants suspected sex offenders anonymity for 25 years after their deaths. Stormont passed the legislation from the Alliance-controlled Department of Justice in 2022, with MLAs apparently not grasping its implications.

Pressure for repeal will be increased by a ‘Thunderer’ column in the Times - a bylined editorial by its long-time chief reporter, Sean O’Neill. In it he warns the “absurd” law could stifle reporting in Britain.

He gives the hypothetical example of London newspapers being unable to name Jimmy Savile if a complaint had ever been made about the BBC presenter to police in Northern Ireland. Any reporter that did so could be jailed for six months.