Stormont will overspend by £660 million this year due to the cost of living crisis and loss of budgetary control thanks to the DUP boycott, Sinn Féin finance minister Conor Murphy has revealed - and that assumes it can spend £300m the boycott has left in limbo.
The overspend could be deducted from next year’s block grant, which itself could be cut because of the economic calamity the Tories have unleashed across the UK.
Although the gap is huge, equal to 5 per cent of the block grant, plugging it is not hopeless. Last month, the first report from the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council noted Stormont could raise £615m a year by bringing domestic rates up to the same level as council tax and water charges in England. The Fiscal Council is an independent body under Mr Murphy’s department, created by New Decade, New Approach to advise Stormont on its finances.
There is no future that does not involve us paying more of our own way and that moment of truth may be upon us.
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As the October 28 deadline looms for the collapse of devolution, speculation is growing the DUP might reset the clock with a ‘hokey-cokey’ manoeuvre, by nominating ministers then resigning again. Although that would put the executive back into caretaker mode there would be a complication: nominating ministers means nominating a speaker, which would permanently restart the assembly. Even if the new speaker resigned, a deputy could perform the role indefinitely.
The DUP could try presenting this as a phased restoration, albeit five months after Liz Truss expected it in return for her protocol bill. But an assembly can pass laws, with or without the DUP - a genie the party does not want to let out of the bottle.
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One sign Stormont is expected to return is that parties are sizing up their preferred departments. Sinn Féin reportedly wants the Department for the Economy, which would take it out of unionist hands for the first time. The party would use this to prioritise Derry university expansion. It would also acquire Invest NI, for years the DUP’s pride and joy.
Alliance is rumoured to want the Department for Infrastructure, a portfolio it has never held. The four other main parties have tried and failed to transform this notoriously unbiddable department into something more than the Continuity Roads Service. It seems Alliance thinks it can do better.
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A fact often forgotten about Edwin Poots’s DUP leadership is that he ran on a platform of clearing out party headquarters. This was wildly popular with DUP members and popular enough with elected representatives to get him (briefly) into office. John Robinson, the DUP’s long-serving head of communications, was one of the back office staff in the cross-hairs. Mr Robinson was also responsible for refusing entry to the journalist Amanda Ferguson at last weekend’s DUP conference, ensuring an entirely predictable communications fiasco.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson quickly intervened to ensure Ms Ferguson was admitted. Mr Poots may well have allowed himself a quiet ‘I told you so’.
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The Court of Appeal in Belfast has rejected a case by an unnamed young woman that bestowing British citizenship on her automatically at birth was a breach of her right to a private life under the Human Rights Act. She wished to have always been considered only an Irish citizen as she is “fully immersed in all aspects of Irish national culture”.
While the verdict was robust, finding the case had no grounds, judges diplomatically declined to point out the obvious: it would be a serious breach of international rights and norms for any country to withhold automatic entitlement to citizenship due to a person’s cultural background.
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The morning after the EU referendum, Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness opened a new TV studio in Belfast, where the horrified owner warned he would have to move to the Republic as the UK would be cut out of EU broadcasting quotas for “European works”.
Six years on, UK content still counts as European because the EU uses a definition set by the Council of Europe, to which the UK belongs. But many member states want this changed and the British film industry believes its exclusion is inevitable.
That is the prospect hanging over Northern Ireland Screen’s latest business strategy, unveiled this week. The agency has helped build an extraordinary success story but when might the Euro-axe fall?
The protocol offers no reassurance. Its negotiators managed to secure the worst of both worlds - a mention of imposing EU state aid rules on film and TV production in Northern Ireland, with no mention of protecting EU quotas.
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Cycle lanes get a lot of attention in Northern Ireland, considering how few of them there are, yet there is virtually no interest in the lack of footpaths outside urban areas - a far larger ‘active travel’ issue. Sinn Féin infrastructure minister John O’Dowd has just approved a footpath between Crumlin and Glenavy, an announcement striking for its rarity. The plan is hardly ambitious, as there are already wide verges along much of the three-mile route. Yet the announcement is still conditional on funding and acquiring extra land. Building footpaths beside all main roads remains a fantastical proposition.
