The faults in Stormont’s £80 million Social Investment Fund (SIF), long criticised by the SDLP as a “slush fund”, are hardly news but a report from the Audit Office has finally made them official.
Auditor general Kieran Donnelly has compared the scheme’s failings to RHI, in terms of the nepotism, amateurism and patronage exposed in power-sharing government.
RHI was limited to Stormont, however. Sinn Féin and the DUP have been accused by other parties of replicating SIF at Belfast City Council. The Northern Ireland Office added £25 million to SIF in last November’s one-off budget, clearly in an attempt to restart devolution. Cash carve-ups look less like a design flaw at Stormont than a design feature of the peace process. Would the DUP and Sinn Féin work together anywhere without them?
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It has emerged during a judicial review into an abortion pill prosecution that the PSNI turned up at a 15-year-old girl’s school and removed her from class for questioning. Officers were investigating the girl’s mother for procuring pills, having become aware of the case through a chain of referrals from a GP, a counselling service and social services.
Regardless of any view on abortion or Northern Ireland’s laws on abortion this was an extraordinary incident, like something from a dystopian novel, particularly as relevant PSNI policies and guidelines require interviews with young or vulnerable people to be conducted with the greatest sensitivity. Careful consideration for the location of interviews is repeatedly stipulated, for the well-being of the subject and to ‘achieve best evidence’.
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In 2005, Gerry Adams told Bertie Ahern to have him arrested if the former Taoiseach believed the former Sinn Féin president had foreknowledge of the Northern Bank robbery.
Ahern had to remind Adams that, unlike in the republican movement, heads of government do not have people arrested.
Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly appears to need a similar reminder. The party’s policing spokesman has denounced as “an act of gross bad faith by the British government” the arrest of John Downey, previously accused of the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park bombing and now accused of murdering two soldiers ten years earlier. Stranger still, Downey blamed the DUP.
The arrest was in fact an act of the PSNI, the Garda Siochana, the Public Prosecution Service and Dublin’s High Court. The British government has spent the past two years petulantly objecting to Troubles arrests and prosecutions. A previous government did issue Downey with an on-the-run letter, until a court case rendered it untenable, and also agreed an amnesty for IRA on-the-runs and former security force personnel, until the SDLP embarrassed Sinn Féin into withdrawing support for it. That at least proved Sinn Féin is capable of embarrassment, which would otherwise be in serious doubt.
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While the whole of Europe frets over the possibility of one dissident republican and his dog knocking a camera off a pole outside Strabane, loyalists have brought anarchy to Larne and nobody has batted an eyelid. The PSNI, as well as private homes and cars, came under sustained attack from a masked mob of 40 people following “proactive activity by the paramilitary crime task force against elements of the South East Antrim UDA”, according to a police statement. This direct challenge to authority has a Brexit dimension. The task force incorporates the National Crime Agency and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, so it will matter more than cameras in securing the border. Internal security is the immediate concern, however. In 2011, a weak response from PSNI management to a similar incident sparked a three year spiral of loyalist violence in South East Antrim, until a crackdown was finally instituted.
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The criminal justice system has managed to convict someone of burning tyres. Craigavon Magistrates Court has fined a Dungannon man £1,000 for burning car tyres on the shores of Lough Neagh. Police had observed the activity after officers from the Northern Ireland Environment Agency established tyres were being burned regularly at the site. The conviction was for breaches of waste management legislation. Obviously, none of this is possible with ‘cultural’ tyre incineration and we must all confine ourselves to debating whether offensive signs and effigies on such fires constitute a crime.
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The BBC claims to have seen a copy of the government’s timetable to sell a Brexit Withdrawal Agreement deal. Downing Street says the document is so absurd and poorly written it is obviously a hoax, as if absurdity and sloppiness have not become Brexit’s hallmarks.
According to the document, November 24 is to be the ‘Northern Ireland and the Union theme’ day, with the prime minister visiting businesses and border communities, the secretary of state “doing media” and attempts underway to get support from the Taoiseach.
The document does not mention this is also the date of the DUP party conference. It is a testament to how unionism is seen at Westminster that it is plausible the government would schedule a Brexit ‘Northern Ireland day’ around the DUP conference, yet equally plausible it could do so oblivious of the DUP conference.
newton@irishnews.com
