One month after the A5 dual carriageway apparently received the final go-ahead, the Department for Infrastructure has received notice of another intended legal challenge.
Sinn Féin minister John O’Dowd said he was “extremely disappointed” but he can hardly be surprised. This is increasingly the fate of any attempt to build anything, anywhere.
In February, the UK government commissioned an expert review of the problem of endless legal challenges to major infrastructure projects. Known as the Banner Review, it made 10 recommendations which are currently out to public consultation.
Most are highly technical and not all would translate to Northern Ireland’s separate and much smaller legal system, but the general thrust involves reducing opportunities and timescales for judicial review, streamlining planning and court procedures and developing more expertise among judges.
Obviously, we need our own review here. It might take years but the alternative is routinely taking decades.
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Thanks to last month’s Westminster budget, Sinn Féin finance minister Caoimhe Archibald had an extraordinary £700 million to hand out in the latest monitoring round, the executive’s thrice-yearly reallocation of unspent funds.
She gave half to the Department of Health, yet UUP health minister Mike Nesbitt still refused to endorse the round as it did not meet all his ‘cost pressures’, which are mainly due to agreed pay rises. The UUP also refused to endorse the previous round and the draft budget.
Other departments face similar pressures and received a far less generous allocation. Their ministers are taking collective responsibility, not grandstanding against their own administration.
Mandatory coalition once provided a weak excuse for parties to pretend to be in government and opposition at the same time. That excuse was removed by the 2020 New Decade, New Approach deal, which enabled smaller parties to enter official opposition up to two years after an executive is formed. The UUP has that option until February 2026.
[ UUP opposition to budget could signal next Stormont crisis – Newton EmersonOpens in new window ]
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The British Medical Association (BMA) in Northern Ireland has warned that many GP practices will reduce services and some will close due to the employers’ national insurance increase in Westminster’s budget.
The increase adds around £900 to the cost of employing one person. Although most public bodies are reimbursed, most GP practices are private businesses and will have to bear the full cost.
However, chancellor Rachel Reeves has merely restored the tax to the level it was at in 2022 and 2023, when most practices would have been on the same contracts with much the same income and outgoings.
Practices face genuine financial challenges, exacerbated by unique Stormont failings on issues such as insurance. But it must be remembered that the BMA is just a middle-class trade union. Not all the ailments it complains about are necessarily an emergency.
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Northern Ireland’s co-option system for Stormont and councils removes democratic choice and reduces transparency, an Electoral Commission report has said.
It proposes a “substitution list” as one possible solution, with candidates nominating replacements for themselves when they run for office. This is used for some seats in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies and was used for all seats at Stormont until 2009.
It is more democratic in principle, as voters are endorsing the list of replacements, but in practice it is simply ‘pre co-option’.
Independent MLAs may still provide a substitute list, although they do not have to do so until after they are elected, revealing this to be more about practicality than principle.
Some form of co-option is unavoidable in multi-seat constituencies, as otherwise the largest local party would win every by-election. The only truly democratic alternative would be creating 90 single-seat assembly constituencies, most of which would be safe seats given our divided geography.
This would entrench far worse problems than the non-problem of co-option.
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There has been a lively debate in Dublin for a decade on relocating urban golf courses for housing.
Four years ago, Dublin-based Merrion Property Group offered to move Belfast’s Balmoral Golf Club so it could buy the 75-acre site. To demonstrate its seriousness, Merrion purchased a 150-acre country estate a few miles away in Drumbo and brought in a former Ryder Cup captain to design a championship replacement course.
Balmoral’s members declined the offer but now they may have to sell all or part of their course for housing anyway, as their club is in financial difficulty. Meanwhile, Merrion has put the Drumbo estate back on the market.
Members of other private golf clubs across Belfast will no doubt consider this a cautionary tale. They are not immune from the social and economic changes it represents.
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Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald has said it is unreasonable to ask most of her party’s representatives about the Troubles, due primarily to their age.
Interviewed on Joe Brolly’s podcast, she said: “The Free State establishment does have a difficulty, or reluctance, or refusal at key points in time, to move on and to actually accept that you don’t ask someone who was a baby in the 1970s about things that happened in the 1970s. That’s not a reasonable proposition, it wouldn’t be reasonably done with somebody from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or the Labour Party.”
This might be fair enough, were it not yet another example of Sinn Féin’s ever-shifting statute of limitations on the past.
DUP leader Gavin Robinson was born in 1984. Should he never be asked about anything dodgy his party might have been involved with right up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement? It seems unlikely that is the view of the republican establishment.
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Latest figures from England show another large increase in the number of ‘neets’ – young people not in education, employment or training.
The 18.6 per cent total is the highest since 2014, when youth joblessness had recovered from the financial crash. Nor is this part of a general trend: inactivity levels are falling among the rest of the working-age population.
[ Newton Emerson: Is enforced education really the best way to reach ‘neets’?Opens in new window ]
This has implications for DUP minister Paul Givan’s recently-announced plan to make education or training compulsory up the age of 18. Since England introduced this policy in 2015, the neet total it was meant to reduce has moved steadily in the opposite direction.
That does not mean the policy is causing the problem; the problem may well have been worse without it. However, it is clearly not the silver bullet most of its proponents appear to believe.