JUST when it seemed we were handling the weather well, Lough Neagh has flooded homes and businesses.
However, it is a simple matter in practical terms to stop this happening again.
The level of the lough is artificially maintained at between 12.45 and 12.60 metres above sea level by sluice gates at Toome.
The Rivers Agency, which is responsible for the level, aims for 12.57 metres in summer dropping to 12.47 in winter to accommodate floods.
This year, with wet weather expected, it has left the gates fully open since early November.
So in future years it should open them earlier or drop the overall range entirely.
The problem is that the range is set in legislation that Stormont would have to change and our political system has shown time and again that it cannot untangle Lough Neagh’s competing sets of interests and ownerships.
Pathetically, this is the most likely reason there will be another flood in the next wet El Nino winter, roughly five years from now.
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THE acquittal of Pastor James McConnell for insulting Islam centred on the difference between ‘offensive’ and ‘grossly offensive’, with a judge finding his remarks were the former but had failed to meet the “high threshold” legal precedent sets for the latter.
However, defending its decision to prosecute, the Public Prosecution Service said: “the decision on whether or not the comment was offensive or grossly offensive was... finely balanced”.
Lesser minds might conclude from such a difference of opinion that judgments of ‘offensiveness’ are a lot more arbitrary than legal experts proclaim - and that they certainly cannot be objective enough on which to balance the rights to freedom of expression, thought, conscience and religion.
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A STRIKING feature of the McConnell verdict was the silence from Northern Ireland’s human rights sector, which apparently struggles to apply universal principles to humans it disagrees with.
This was particularly noticeable in the case of Amnesty Northern Ireland, which only belatedly welcomed the verdict under persistent questioning from the News Letter.
Amnesty was founded to lobby governments on behalf of prisoners of conscience, yet it volunteered no comment while the state tried to lock up a man for professing his faith.
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BELFAST City Council has ‘debated’ a motion to host the Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland soccer teams, which unionists felt to be a nationalist trap.
However, by opposing the motion, unionists still insisted on walking into the trap.
This was all the more unnecessary because it is too late in both teams’ schedules for them to take the council up on its kind invitation.
Any first year hack at a student’s union would have had the wit to handle this by just smiling through gritted teeth.
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SECRETary of state Theresa Villiers will be campaigning for a British EU exit, causing new SDLP leader Colum Eastwood to say she “must outline her position to the people of Northern Ireland.”
Or maybe not, for as Eastwood went on to concede in a confused party statement,
Villiers is “obviously entitled” to engage in Westminster politics, while her “separate responsibility” to represent the people of Northern Ireland is not one the SDLP usually lauds, nor does it extend beyond Westminster.
We are represented in Europe by our MEPs and to Europe by the UK government. It is all rather complicated, so perhaps the SDLP should just repeat its statement last month on abortion, viz: “This is a highly sensitive and very important issue. Until we have considered [it] in full we will not be issuing further comment.”
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RYANAIR announced its return to Belfast - and immediately demanded a tax break.
The budget airline is planning six new routes from Belfast International, three to Britain and three to the continent, but says the latter will be uneconomic if short-haul air passenger duty is not cut.
Stormont has already devolved and cut long-haul duty to save the New York service but that costs less than £1m a year.
Cutting short-haul duty could cost over £50m a year, which Stormont has repeatedly declared to be out of the question.
However, the £200m cost of cutting corporation tax does rather refresh this question, being on a similar scale with similar hopes.
Ryanair is an interesting study in how useless cutting corporation tax might be.
Headquartered in Dublin, it usually pays far less than even the Republic’s already-low rate.
In 2009 it even managed to pay nothing - and got a €1.5m rebate.
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THE BBC has obtained transcripts of telephone calls between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton after submitting a freedom of information request to the Clinton Presidential Library.
These show Clinton expressing frustration with Gerry Adams over Sinn Fein’s foot-dragging on decommissioning and sympathy for David Trimble due to “all those crazies in his party”.
Fortunately for our fresh new start, the transcripts date from 1997 to 2000 - long before Arlene Foster fell out with Trimble over decommissioning.
newton@irishnews.com
