The Lough Neagh algal bloom is back, earlier and nastier than last year. But the green-blue tide has hopefully been turned by Alliance agriculture minister Andrew Muir, who has managed to get his Lough Neagh recovery plan through the executive.
This was no mean achievement, requiring a combination of cunning and tact that is all too rare at Stormont.
The DUP had been blocking the plan to avoid upsetting farmers. Sinn Féin would not call the DUP out because it shares responsibility for causing the problem and is equally unwilling to tackle its root causes. About 70 per cent of Lough Neagh’s pollution is due to farming, with most of the rest due to underinvestment in the water system.
The political power of agriculture is a spell that could be broken. It is effectively a nationalised industry – why should government be frightened of telling it what to do?
At least Northern Ireland is not uniquely dysfunctional. A blue-green algal bloom has appeared in lake Windermere, England’s largest lake, due to similar failings.
The political power of agriculture is a spell that could be broken. It is effectively a nationalised industry – why should government be frightened of telling it what to do?
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Labour’s promise to repeal the Legacy Act has turned out exactly as expected.
Proposals in the King’s Speech show the government will strike down conditional immunity and the ban on inquests and civil cases. However, it will keep the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, the body at the centre of the existing legislation, while enhancing its independence.
The commission combines the roles of the two main bodies in the Stormont House Agreement, which had the support of the Irish government and every Stormont party except the UUP. Equivalent bodies were proposed by the 2009 Eames-Bradley report.
The government says it will consult Dublin and Stormont parties on replacement legislation. This is both an offer of input and a challenge to admit this is a basic structure everyone keeps coming back to again and again.
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What is the point of BBC Northern Ireland’s enormous news-gathering operation if all it does is publish PSNI press releases?
That was the entirety of its coverage for the first night of rioting across the Broadway roundabout in Belfast, around a mile from Broadcasting House. The press releases were just short warnings to the public to keep away. Meanwhile, newspaper journalists and photographers provided live coverage online. A BBC reporter was finally despatched on the second night.
Reorganisation of the BBC’s Belfast newsroom is turning it into a feature-led website – and a rather low-brow one at that. This would be hard enough to justify as entertainment from a public service broadcaster, let alone as news.
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The government has refused to provide a £200 million loan guarantee to Harland and Wolff, a complicated and controversial decision that is nevertheless considered entirely understandable by industry insiders.
The TUV has suggested it is due to EU rules on state aid via the Windsor Framework, but Treasury rules are the sole factor at this stage. Few experts believe Brussels would have objected in any case: subsidised shipyards are hardly unusual in the EU.
Some unionists have drawn comparisons with the government’s interest in subsidising Casement Park. The EU has state aid rules against subsidising stadiums, although again it aims not to intervene.
The simplest way to claim exemption from those rules is for the stadium to be opened to other sports at least 20% of the time – an intriguing scenario to contemplate.
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Sinn Féin took noticeably longer than other parties to condemn the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, raising questions from unionists and others.
Some DUP representatives claimed republicans were embarrassed about IRA murders and attempted murders of politicians, but that is easy to brush off with the usual generalities – “We regret all deaths... there were deaths on all sides…” and so on.
A likelier explanation is that the party was weighing up how every word of a statement would play with supporters who despise Trump or are unhappy with Sinn Féin’s US engagement amid the war in Gaza.
Another context for the party’s dithering is that 46 per cent its voters in the Republic believe in conspiracy theories, according to Electoral Commission research published last week. Triangulating yourself from the margins to the mainstream is becoming increasingly difficult in a complicated world.
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As regular readers of this column will know, whenever you hear the words ‘data protection’ you should immediately think ‘bulls***’.
A particularly pungent whiff of bovine excrement is drifting over Bangor Castle, headquarters of Ards and North Down Borough Council. It is refusing to release the names of councillors who sent a call-in request to the chief executive over a council policy to fly flags on war memorials.
Loyalist activist Jamie Bryson has been told he cannot obtain the names of those councillors as they have “individual data rights” and have not consented to release of the information.
There are legitimate reasons why councillors might want privacy and perhaps they should have it but officials should find a better reason than the witless fallback of ‘it’s on a computer’. This is embedding terrible assumptions and precedents in public institutions, such as the council’s apparent belief anything discussed by email can be kept secret.
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Welsh first minister Vaughan Gething has reluctantly stepped down after cabinet colleagues resigned and called on him to go. The saga is partly due to a controversial campaign donation but it came to a head over the deletion of group chat messages during the pandemic.
Texts leaked to the media showed Gething, then health minister, telling other ministers he was deleting messages as “they can be captured in a Freedom of Information request”.
Two months ago he sacked a minister he accused of leaking the texts, precipitating the cabinet revolt. Everyone involved is in the Labour Party.
The contrast with Stormont is striking. Despite being warned to keep messages, official ministerial phones were reset to factory settings.
The DUP handed over 60 pages of private exchanges between its members, some of it embarrassingly gossipy, but Sinn Féin performed the IT equivalent of staring silently at a spot on the wall.
