Play nice!

OH dear! Maybe it’s about time planning was devolved down to local councils. After this week’s stormy Environment Committee meeting at Stormont, local councils seem havens of calm introspection.


And it was all over a planning application for some homes in a greenbelt area (where have we heard that on before?) that seemed not to meet some esoteric criteria but got the nod anyway.


Cue - indignation, hurled insults and general bad schoolboy behaviour. Whatever the record for interruptions is, committee members seemed to have eyed this as a possibility, so much so that three dots and ‘interruption’ will account for about 50% of the Hansard record, and that’s not counting the debate over waste!