YOU know you are dragging your feet when Northern Ireland’s court system tells you to get a move on.
A review into delays in 56 Troubles-linked inquests is provoking sharp observations from the presiding judge.
Lord Justice Weir has been particularly scathing about the PSNI redaction of files to protect the right to life of persons named - officially the reason documents take so long to release.
“Redaction is supposed to be taken seriously,” the judge said, issuing a blunt two-week deadline to “do them when I say they are to be done.”
In a case from 1972, where Gerry Adams and British soldiers are listed as witnesses, Weir mocked claims of poor memories and missing records, noting that Adams’s role at the time was “not a secret” and the Ministry of Defence had traced every soldier involved in Bloody Sunday.
It looks like an emperor’s new clothes moment on the issue of dealing with the past - although there is a sense this is only happening because ‘the past’ is becoming history.
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THE DUP and Sinn Fein have cobbled together a budget for the next financial year, to see Stormont through until after May’s election.
The UUP, having walked out of the executive, was only given advance sight of the document overnight and naturally opposed it.
But the SDLP and Alliance, who are still in the executive, also voted against their own government’s financial plans.
“This is a budget which is depressingly familiar. There is no fresh start here,” SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said.
Yet his in-out stance is also depressingly familiar - recalling the DUP’s half-membership of the pre-2002 executive.
The last two years of budgetary crises could have been avoided if the SDLP had not decided to be Sinn Fein’s mudguard during cynical electioneering around welfare reform.
Perhaps what we need is some fresh opposition.
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IT would be unfair to single out Colum Eastwood over low standards of financial debate.
One of the flagship projects in the budget is a new “Mother and Children’s Hospital” to replace Belfast’s Royal Victoria Children’s Hospital.
On the basis of this single item, DUP finance minister Mervyn Storey has come perilously close to suggesting that any critics of the budget must dislike mothers and children.
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PSNI detectives have extradited a woman from Sweden while investigating prostitution and human trafficking in Northern Ireland.
This is rather ironic, as the so-called ‘Swedish model’ of outlawing prostitution while treating prostitutes as victims was cited by DUP MLA Lord Morrow as the implicitly liberal basis of his 2015 bill against human trafficking.
Morrow has just been appointed minister of social development, which puts him in charge of liquor licensing - so there is little hope for a new campaign by publicans to ease Northern Ireland’s Easter alcohol restrictions.
However, the minister is unlikely to quote scripture against the Devil’s buttermilk. He may simply point out how difficult it is to buy a drink in Norway.
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Speaking to Radio Ulster, the vice-chancellors of Northern Ireland’s two universities have said answers are required from Stormont on the funding of higher education.
Many at Stormont might reply: “after you”. To take only the most obvious example, it is still unclear how Ulster University could embark on a £300m campus relocation scheme that it had no hope of affording and for which the taxpayer has now inevitably been billed.
It is not even clear who to seek an answer from, as the University of Ulster Foundation - established to drive the relocation project - was disbanded in 2013 without replacement or explanation.
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IN 2007, Sinn Fein MLA Martina Anderson proposed that low income households in Northern Ireland should receive cheap heating oil from Venezuela, under a socialist assistance programme run by the government of Hugo Chavez.
Anderson was invited to Venezuela by its ruling party to discuss arrangements in early 2008 and raised the issue at Stormont later that year, although it all came to nothing.
Now, with oil prices collapsing, Venezuela’s Chavista president has declared a state of economic emergency.
Can we expect a proposal of assistance from Northern Ireland, in the spirit of international solidarity?
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A PSNI officer who threatened to arrest a judge, at a hearing into repossession of the officer’s house, has received support online from ‘freemen’ - adherents of a doctrine known as ‘freemen on the land’, which holds that all law is contract and hence not binding without your consent.
Some of the officer’s comments and behaviour make more sense under this philosophy, as does the apparent over-reaction of the authorities, who have referred the matter to the attorney general in addition to prosecuting the officer for contempt.
Freemanism may be arcane, obscure and unsuccessful in every forum it has been tried but as a wind up of the legal establishment it has proved surprisingly effective.
Think of it as the libertarian equivalent of not recognising the court.
newton@irishnews.com
