Waiting times for orthopaedic surgery in Belfast have risen 75 per cent in a year because the easiest targets for cost cutting are the so-called ‘waiting list initiatives’, where operations are outsourced to private firms. Health and social care board chief executive Valerie Watts - who in effect runs the NHS in Northern Ireland - has admitted to the BBC that this is a general problem. However, waiting list firms only exist because of their below-cost access to NHS resources, ranging from specialist staff to specialist equipment. Instead of chucking a fortune into hidden subsidies for private businesses, the NHS could tighten up contracts and leases to stop its own surgeons moonlighting in its own operating theatres then billing it five times their usual salary. But sure, that’s just crazy talk.
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Gerry Adams has led a Sinn Fein delegation to Downing Street for talks on welfare reform - but what is the party’s leverage for negotiation? Martin McGuinness referred pointedly to the “still fragile peace” but it is hard to see any of our current trouble-makers kicking off on Sinn Fein’s behalf. Forcing an election would only bring everyone back to where we are now, while collapsing the assembly threatens unionists with British rule, which is no threat at all. In an interview two weeks ago with the London-based Irish Post, McGuinness said: “If the British Government take back welfare powers from the north, or put in a civil servant to set a budget in imposing further cuts, that would be totally unacceptable to Sinn Fein - and I let them draw their own conclusions as to what that means.” Might the government have concluded that it means very little?
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The welfarist of the week award goes to Nipsa assistant general secretary Bumper Graham, who has told the Belfast Telegraph and Radio Ulster than Northern Ireland has a higher benefits bill than the UK average because we have “a much younger population.” In fact, with pensions and pensioner benefits making up half the welfare budget, our younger population means we should have a below-average bill. The reason we do not is as mysterious as why a trade unionist would defend it.
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Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council is threatening to fine a farmer for smoking in his tractor by contending that the vehicle is a workplace that can accommodate more than one person. This is striking assertiveness from a council that spent the months before the Twelfth frantically equivocating over a huge bonfire full of tyres in Monkstown, whose toxic fumes were illegal for exactly the same reason that smoking in a workplace is illegal. “The Council continues to provide advice and assistance and encourage participation in the bonfire protocol,” was a typical statement. Why couldn’t Antrim and Newtownabbey’s ‘tobacco enforcement officer’ (yes really) have given the farmer advice?
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After police stood by during republican and loyalist paramilitary funerals, it was hard for the DUP to complain consistently about the former without complaining about the latter. So it simply didn’t try, with Gregory Campbell sounding particularly inconsistent in several spluttering media performances. The republican funeral, for Derry woman Peggy O’Hara, was defended by her granddaughter on the grounds that it was what her granny wanted. With all due respect to the bereaved, this is not a good enough reason in itself to host a Real IRA jamboree. Everyone has two grannies who might want anything. If we had to give them whatever they wanted, where would it end?
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All that tip-toeing around loyalism has earned the PSNI no thanks, as evidenced by a UDA threat to force officers from their homes. The threat was made by the North Antrim, Londonderry and Tyrone branch of the UPRG, the unelected ‘political party’ that keeps the UDA plugged into public posts and funding - often via police liaison bodies, ironically. “Should [officers] be allowed to live amongst us while they continue to treat us like pariahs?” the UPRG asked on Facebook. Subtle. The PSNI says “no crime has been committed” but thanks to the miracle of New Labour a crime has always been committed and this posting would specifically seem to breach the Public Order Act, the Serious Crime Act, the Terrorism Act and the Communications Act. Perhaps that would be clearer to the authorities if it had been put online by an elderly clergyman.
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Commissioner for public appointments John Keanie has quit a year early in protest at being ignored - echoing the complaints of his predecessor Felicity Huston, who was frozen out in 2011. In a parting shot at Sinn Fein and the DUP, Keanie has called on the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister - which makes most public appointments in Northern Ireland - to address the perception that quango posts are for “an elite and that ordinary people can’t get them”. This accusation does not quite ring true, for while there is certainly a perception that juicy jobs are reserved, in elite circles Sinn Fein and the DUP’s new friends are seen as ordinary to a fault.
newton@irishnews.com
