Fracking golfers!
OH
for frack sake there is a time and a place for over-reaction: it’s when your
football team crashes out of the European championships because they’re awful
or because the referee hadn’t gone to Specsavers.
For
more than 40 years over-reaction has been the stock in trade of Norn Iron’s
political classes, but we all thought they’d have left that behind. Think again
suckers because over-reaction is back and it is kicking up a fine storm.
First
we had the aul’ will ‘e or won’t ‘e palaver about whether or not deputy first
minister Martin McGuinness would shake the hand of Her Maj (nobody seems to
have asked Her Maj whether she wants to shake Marty’s hand) which caused
collective Sinn Féin apoplexy and unionist reciprocal fury.
Next
up we had fracking – to those who still think this is a swear word, it is a
bastardised word for hydraulic fracturing; the means by which the
“unconventional” gas industry a extract shale gas from the ground.
This
week the Co-Op showed a film questioning whether fracking was a good thing or
not. Cue for minister for enterprise, trade and investment Arlene Foster –
normally a sure footed politician – to pen off a missive which was not
complimentary at all about the Co-Op and the film called ‘Gasland’.
In
terms of over-reaction questioning the ethics of an institution that is an
ethically investor scores high on the over-reaction scale, perhaps higher than
the richter scale than last year’s earth tremors near Blackpool, allegedly caused
by fracking.
But
the over-reaction scale went through the rant-ometer rating when the National
Trust, that radical left-wing Trotsky-ite revolutionary garden club, had the
temerity to launch a legal challenge about a golf resort on the north coast,
less than one-mile away from the entrance to the Giant’s Causeway.
Finn
MacCool must be threatening a comeback at the prospect of more golf courses on
the north coast…well we think that was the basis of the National Trust’s legal
challenge, but we may be mistaken.
That
the National Trust challenged this development, which has been the subject of
planning controversy for 12 years or so, provoked a stereotypical backlash.
These included dark murmurings about the fact that the Trust had gotten
Government grants towards a new visitor centre and development of facilities at
the Giant’s Causeway, mutterings about biting the hand that feeds and the need
for golf to relieve the stress rich businessmen and well healed tourists during
the worst recession in living memory. We beg to differ on that last point, we
know a great granny whose living memory extends to the Great Depression of the
30s, the current recession hasn’t even been given capital letters yet.
We
do wonder at this over-reaction by the DUP in particular to this lawful
challenge by the National Trust to a decision made by an SDLP minister. Let’s
face it, the Giant’s Causeway will be here long after Rory McIlroy retires from
the Senior Golf Tour.