The world may have changed since 2016 but President Trump’s first term remains our best guide to how he might treat Northern Ireland during his second.
Devolution collapsed for the first three years of that term and Brexit brinkmanship over the protocol was fraught for its final three. Trump publicly supported Brexit and privately downplayed the Irish border issue, according to diplomatic sources.
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The DUP considered him a natural ally, while the SDLP boycotted his St Patrick’s Day receptions. But the practical impact of any of this is hard to discern and in general the White House conducted itself much as always.
Trump expressed even-handed hopes for a resolution at Stormont, paid lip-service to special relationships with Britain and Ireland and ordered no changes to long-standing US policy on Northern Ireland.
He was equally anodyne once freed from the chains of office. Asked about the subsequent collapse of Stormont during a visit to the Republic last year, Trump said: “Well, we’re going to see. They’re negotiating and we’re going to see, there are a lot of negotiations going on in Ireland and other places right now, but it’s going be a tough one. It’s not an easy one. We have to work it out.”
Nobody wants to get involved in our nonsense.
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Trump’s inauguration in January will presumably mark the end of the tenure of Joe Kennedy III as the US President’s special envoy to Northern Ireland. Unless Kennedy announces a major investment in the next two months, he will have little to show for two years in a role that is focused on the economy and was backed by President Biden with promises of billions of dollars.
Trump may appoint his own envoy, as he did after the restoration of Stormont in 2020. Mick Mulvaney was a serious figure who had been White House chief of staff. But the pandemic meant he could do nothing and he resigned after the Capitol riots, accusing Trump of inciting an “attempted coup”.
Whoever is in charge, there is a fundamental problem with the envoy’s economic role. Biden and Trump share a policy of ‘reshoring’ US investment back to the US. We are not so special that they can cheer dollars flowing in the opposite direction.
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The Save Lough Neagh campaign, whose members include People Before Profit and several trade unions, has held a protest in Belfast demanding more investment in sewage infrastructure. A People Before Profit activist called for NI Water to be brought into public ownership and “run at cost” so that “working people will not foot the bill for decades of government failings”.
NI Water is already a government-owned company run at cost. The £20m ‘dividend’ it pays Stormont each year is a technicality – Stormont is paying it almost £500m.
The real problem for the left-populist comrades is how to exploit the crisis in Lough Neagh without admitting we all need to pay more for water one way or another, through bills, taxes, cuts elsewhere, or higher prices as developers pass on levies. There are no capitalist cartoon villains here to blame.
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The SDLP has pressed DUP communities minister Gordon Lyons over Casement Park. Lyons says he is committed to the £62.5 million the executive promised in 2011. Asked by opposition leader Matthew O’Toole if he will “budge” on this, the minister snapped back: “I am not a magician”.
Lyons would have to get any extra money from Sinn Féin finance minister Caoimhe Archibald. Notably, she declined to criticise him when invited to do so by the SDLP during the same assembly session, criticising London instead. GAA president Jarlath Burns praised Lyons last week for being “very committed to the project”.
Frankly, it looks like the SDLP is stirring the pot. It would be more useful to gently inquire about an inflationary adjustment. The 2011 figure would be £90m at today’s prices.
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The government is making an inflationary adjustment to university tuition fees, raising the legal maximum from £9,250 to £9,535.
This will mean an extra cost for Stormont, unless it does the same for Northern Ireland’s lower £4,750 fee, as it subsidises the difference.
The extra cost will not be large – about £600,000 – but it is suspected the government plans a fuller adjustment in future, reflecting that fees have not risen since 2017 or kept pace with inflation since the £9,000 maximum was introduced in 2012. Had they done so, the maximum would now be £12,575 and Stormont would face an extra bill of £20m a year.
Student places are capped in Northern Ireland to keep the subsidy under control, restricting the growth of our universities and damaging the economy overall. This is a high price to pay for a giveaway that primarily benefits the middle-classes. It would make far more sense to transfer some or all of the £98m cost of the subsidy into the existing grant scheme for low-income students, then lift the cap.
If costs rise, there is a danger of spineless Stormont keeping fees where they are lowering the cap instead.
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Solicitors and barristers in Northern Ireland have taken part in a one-day strike over legal aid. Their action included refusing to work on all serious cases in the crown courts.
The Law Society and the Bar Council – the trade unions involved – apologised to those affected by the disruption, although it will scarcely have been noticeable amid the general slowness and delay in the criminal justice system.
On average, a person due at a crown court in Northern Ireland as a victim, defendant or witness will see their case adjourned 6.5 times, usually due to paperwork errors or other people not turning up. Two-thirds of victims and witnesses are eventually told they are not needed anyway.
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Video footage of a drugs arrest was watched largely “without legitimate purpose” 248 times at 20 police stations over three years, the office of the Police Ombudsman has discovered. Its finding has resulted in “management action” against 74 officers.
The footage from a body-worn camera appears to have been treated as entertainment because the arresting officer made a mistake administering a caution, “causing a colleague in the background to laugh”.
If it is the culture among PSNI officers to treat data protection as a joke, does Stormont really need to pay them £140m in compensation for last year’s data breach?