To university we go!

HOLD the front pages – the Norn Iron Executive has managed to make a decision. Yes, a real live, honest to goodness decision!

Student fees for our two ‘prestigious’ universities have been steadied at around £3,500, give or take a few quid.

The cost of this will be borne by to nabbing £40 million plus from somewhere else to hand out to the universities, with the exact details to be unveiled next week.

It also means that some of the political parties will be able to keep their election ‘promises’.

What we wonder – as do many others – is what sort of creative accounting are the Norn Iron Executive undertaking to bail out the universities, and at the same time put in place higher fees for non-Norn Iron students.

What superb accountants they must be to find funds for such extravagance, and can they come and look at our household budgets when they have a spare moment or so.

Of course, there are conspiracy theorists out there (we prefer to call them cynics when we are numbered among their ranks). They might suggest that there will be some sort of cull of other budgets, with accident and emergency departments and further education college campuses closing their doors.

On the other hand there might be a clear out of the more esoteric degrees from universities, such as the Slavic Music in the 13th century masters, or of the even less practical qualifications, such as degrees in journalism.

In the meantime we are predicting (not too confidently) a property boom in Norn Iron. If plans go ahead for higher fees for non-Norn Iron students then English students’ parents may think it better value to buy a cheap terraced house for Charles and Edwina to claim residency and avail of the reduced uni rates. We can recommend some discounted properties on the up-coming bijous markets on the Falls and Shankill Roads which they may wish to invest in…

An open letter to SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie

Dear Ms Ritchie,

We applaud your courageous decision to stand down as leader of the SDLP and as MLA for South Down. Thank you for your service to the party over the past two years. You will now have the time to remove the knives in your back.

You will no doubt also take the time to reflect on your tenure as leader as you enjoy the calmer waters of Westminster, particularly on the fact that under your stewardship, the party lost fewer Assembly seats than under previous incumbents.

We also hope that you pay particular attention to any representatives of the United States of America. Perhaps you may wish to give them a stout length of County Down oak in commemoration of the leaked comments about your allegedly ‘wooden’ media performances.

Yours etc

Spend, spend, spend...and lose

THE classic story of a football pools winner in the 20th century was someone who won millions and squandered the lot to end up back where they started. How much worse would it be to spend all that and end up in a poorer state?

Well the Ulster Unionist Party shelled out £96,000 in advance of May’s Assembly election and managed to lose seats. They were the biggest spenders; and one must question the tactics that cost them so much to achieve so little.

In contrast, the Alliance Party’s £29,000 spend produced eight seats – at an average cost of £3,625 a seat.

Even better value was the DUP’s £52,000 resulting in 38 seats, averaging out at about £2,120 a seat.

And even better value, Sinn Féin’s 29 seats cost an average around £1,750 a seat in the Assembly.

And when it comes to expenses, a tight rein may be exerted on all MLAs, but who will hold the reins come the next time the UUP plan an election campaign. One thinks that spending close on £100,000 may not be top of the party’s agenda.

Fianna Fails

FIANNA Fáil has failed, well not so much failed but rather decided not to fail in the Irish presidential election.

Leader Michael Martin announced on Wednesday last week that Fianna Fáil will not be nominating a candidate for the forthcoming presidential poll in the Republic. In a wonderfully worded statement, Mr Martin said that the party had undertaken research that indicated there “wouldn’t be any significant shift or change in terms of public opinion."

Translation: “We’d get a kicking in the ballot boxes!”

Perhaps some would say there is a lesson for certain parties in Northern Ireland, but even more pertinent could be FF dangling the carrot of a potential link-up with the SDLP.

Both parties are struggling to re-build after electoral slumps. With Sinn Féin in electoral ascendancy in the North, a formal link would demonstrate the SDLP's nationalist credentials and provide a distraction from FF’s woes.

And with the social media tweeting about a possible late Sinn Féin presidential candidate from North of Ireland, the pressure on both Fianna Fáil and the SDLP to show a commitment to a united island becomes all the more relevant.

The question is whether any of the potential SDLP leadership candidates float this idea ahead of the party conference...just to see if there is any mood for desperate measures.

Protect us from petitions

THERE is a rather extreme view that this ‘tinterweb’ thingymabob is a good thing. But given the recent British Government initiative on e-petitions, we are wondering whether those with access to the ‘tinterweb’ should have to pass a stupidity test before being allowed to connect to the world wide web.

The first e-petition out of the blocks is the death penalty. The ‘weight’ of opinion for this means Parliament will get to debate something that will never happen.

Well, of course we do have a contingent of ‘hang ‘em high’ Tory backbenchers...

Nevermind that the death penalty doesn’t reduce crime, or that the risk of miscarriages of justice has too high price...

However, it was nice that it gave Jeffrey Donaldson a chance to go on the air and repeat the DUP stance, which roughly equates to “death is too good for them”.

Can’t wait for that debate in the Assembly, let alone Westminster!

Moral panic fear outbreaks across the nation

THE United Kingdom is in the grip of fear, a fear induced by unprecedented moral panic.

Politicians, pundits, op-ed columnists and everyone who can dial into a radio show have been caught up in the rampant theft of clichés; charges are likely to be brought on those who have trotted out with armloads of unfounded opinions.

As a people we must fight back against this fever of fervent fundamentally flawed wafflers.

This post-modernist world we have plunged into is one where airtime is given to anyone, where we fear that everyone with an opinion is granted equal weight – everyone has a rear end too, but we don’t want to see those on the air either.

The fight back begins now.

We urge every broadcaster, every leader column writer and every numpty of an excuse for a politician to be silenced. Then perhaps we can make sense of this moral panic...

Yes, there have been riots and looting and criminality. Yes, it has shocked us all – well apart from those with a nice new shiny 42” plasma screen TV gratis.

So, what to do?

If the recalled MPs and the pundits hanging on their words were to think for a moment then, rather than polluting the airwaves in a competition to seem more outraged than the last punter, they might think that the obvious thing to do is ask a question.

Why?

And ask the question to the right people.

In the meantime we have the prospect of anyone covering their faces being potentially charged by gallant police men.

Yeah, we can see that working in Norn Iron – we have to cover our heads and pull hoods tight to survive the vagaries of the weather...

And, while the PSNI are capable of many things we can’t really see them having a wee chat with the rioters at Ardoyne shops next year urging them not to cover their wee fresh faces...

Can MLAs do sums?

ACCORDING to the BBC website the Assembly is shelling out more than £1m each year for security, maintenance and running costs for a property that it wants to sell for £2.5m after buying it in 2001 for £9m.

Ormiston House is a historic property that deserves to be noted, acknowledged and protected, but that is what the planning service does.

The Assembly is not exactly a cheap legislature, so rather than shell out £1m plus would it not be easier to set up an auction where the highest bidder gets the property. It may not be the best solution, but the loss on a piece of capital will be more than made up for by the savings in running costs.

Perhaps the accountants, auditors and actuaries may not be happy at shifting the various monies across the columns of their ‘books’, but then again common sense may break out. If something costs you £1m per year with no real benefits, get rid of it!

Fight Club!

WHAT happens in Fight Club stays in Fight Club is the infamous phrase from the eponymous Fight Club movie and political leaders from the beginning of time must have wished that they could impose such discipline! And prime amongst them right now is Margaret ‘Wooden’ Ritchie.

The ‘wooden’ title comes not from our pen, rather from the wikileaks intercepts of US state department emails. But, if that was all of Ms Ritchie and the SDLP’s woes, then summer would be a time to relax.

Instead there now follows massive uncertainty about the leadership. Patsy McGlone, deputy leader, has tossed his hat into the ring and became the first to break cover. Defeated leadership candidate Alasdair McDonnell is allegedly coming under pressure to enter the leadership race.

The below the line message is that Ms Ritchie’s leadership has seen the collapse of the SDLP vote and the loss of two Assembly seats. And this only goes to prove that pundits sense only the present and lack the perspective of even the recent past.

The reality is that the SDLP’s vote has been slowly sliding away, eroded by a variety of factors, not least by Sinn Féin’s solidity at the ballot box.

And the two seats lost should be seen in terms of losses and gains across the region.
But, please, please Ms Ritchie, Mr McGlone and Dr McDonnell can you keep this going solidly until the party conference? You’ll need extra space for the frustrated journos, bloggers, film crews, twitterers and political anoraks...oh and we’ll be there too.

However, for the SDLP the real problem is that, despite the melodrama of leadership challenges, there really is only the benefit of being a side show.

Whatever the root causes of the disconnect with the wider public - and worse still this internal wrangling – the four years until the next Assembly election may seem like a lot of time to resolve them, but time’s arrow only points in one direction and the seconds tick-by faster than you think. How many votes can be gained or lost in that time? And will any gains be enough for whatever leader the SDLP emerges with?

At least it wasn’t all hidden behind closed doors. And, in this day of smartphones and social media, we’re glad that that the code of fight club can no longer be held to by MLAs.

A word for the idiots

THIS week saw another piece of idiocy on the streets of Belfast. Taking the place of the idiotic rioters was the discovery of a viable mortar in a residential part of north Belfast.

We cannot, nor can any other sane person, think what sort of political statement can be achieved through such actions; and those responsible cannot possibly think that they can bring about a united Ireland, socialist utopia through such actions.

In the – vain – hope that one of the idiots responsible reads this, we have a word of advice for them: take a holiday.

Go, sun yourselves, get a few cheap beers down yer neck and forget about killing people for some long forgotten cause.

Or, better still, head off to the horn of Africa and carry out some aid work – then if a Somalian fighter kills your sorry rear end, you’ll have done some good before leaving the rest of us in peace.

Thar she blows that great white myth – a decision!

IT looks like there is a distinct possibility that the rarest of beasts has been spotted in Norn Iron – a real, honest to goodness political decision.

For years, the Captain Ahab’s of the chattering classes and the commentariat have been ploughing through the waters of Hansard and the waves of newsprint in search of a decision.

Finally with Moby Dick like suddenness a decision has crested at the most unlikely of times...

Health Minister Edwin Poots has revealed that one of Belfast’s many accident and emergency departments is to close its doors, and the likely candidate is the Belfast City Hospital’s A&E department.

Belfast currently has more hospitals than you can shake a bandage at, with the Royal, the City and the Mater, not to mention the nearby Ulster Hospital.

In days of yore such a luxury was feasible for a number of reasons. In medical terms the care of emergency patients was not as advanced as it is now, where teams of highly trained nurses, anaesthetists, radiographers and doctors need to be on hand.

Then there was of course the political decision to open the Belfast City Hospital to please some people, not least unionists who claimed that the mile or so to the Royal in west Belfast was to venture into uncharted territories. The Mater was seen as a ‘Roman Catholic’ hospital by some, but that never stopped the injured from the Shankill visiting there when needs arose.

Finally there was the situation of political ennui – there has seemed, for the past decade or so, a political boredom with the idea of health as something that was difficult to make a decision on.

This week Edwin Poots was before the health committee at Stormont – a committee called back from recess, unusually, to discuss real politics rather than spouting off in general.

Minister Poots admitted that there was work needing done, and with staff shortages, and a lack of junior doctors such work involved closing something.

His predecessor, Michael McGimpsey had warned that health was under-funded, but a lack of executive willingness to back a UUP minister made sure it was held in abeyance.

Of course, hot on the heels of Minister Poots’ announcement came the ritual of south Belfast politicians whining on about how they would fight to keep the City Hospital A&E Department and denouncing the decision.

Just like the campaigners for about a dozen small hospitals across the region, they are large on rhetoric and short on solutions. And how many people noticed those closures a year or two down the line? And how many remember that those hospitals once provided A&E services.

What Minister Poots needs to do now is to make the closure fact in order to trim the fat away from other hospitals, the Mater being surely next in the firing line, and to invest any savings into making the Royal Hospital’s A&E departments (for there is also the regional children’s A&E unit on the same site) truly world beaters where patient’s care is the best that it can be.

After that he just has his own constituents' complaints about shorter A&E hours at Lagan Valley Hospital to worry about!

FOOTNOTE: Yes, you could argue that Minister Poots’ announcements that Altnagelvin Radiotherapy unit would go ahead was a decision, but for the sake of an extended metaphor we prefer to see it as keeping an election promise that the First and Deputy First Minister made...