Bout ye David!

ACCORDED the honour of addressing the Norn Iron Assembly Prime Minister David Cameron gently chided the assembled MLAs that they needed to get on with getting on as he explained what ‘bread and butter’ politics really are.

It was a little like the public school headmaster telling assembled pupils that they needed to get their priorities straight.

There was, no doubt, straight talking in Stormont Castle when Cameron and attendant puppy Paterson met Martin McGuinness and Peter Robinson. Such straight talking, we are led to believe included: “Look David, you’ll have an extra wee bun whether you like it or not!” Another example was “David, What actually are you doing here?”

And it is that latter question that is perhaps most pertinent one. Was there a clear goal behind the visit? There’s no election in the offing, the edifice of powers-sharing is relatively stable and there was no international media in attendance.

Then it came to us – he was trying to avoid a very public spat with Archbishop of Cantebury Dr Rowan Williams, and mulling over whether the Lords Templar should vote to get rid of the Lords Spirtual?

Largesse dispensed

WHO gave the new ministers a cheque-book? Health Minister Edwin Poots throws open the doors and announces that Altangelvin hospital in Derry/Londonderry will have a radiotherapy unit. Then Roads Minister Danny Kennedy announces a West Link upgrade for Belfast.

It seems in the run-up to the summer recess the MLAs are determined to be nice to everyone.

But we fear within this velvet glove are a set of knuckle dusters, and hidden in the folder is a cleaver sharpened and ready for cuts.

For, former Chief Examiner of ‘A’ Level Economics, and current Minister for Finance Sammy Wilson seemed pretty sure that we need to cut our cloth in these tough times to match a shrinking budget.

Which sort of means that all these nice new shiny announcements will be paid for by slashed services?

Whether we like it or not the books have to balance and harsh decisions will have to be taken.

Ahh wick like it’s a wikileak

JUST when you thought the world had gotten over itself with the ranting, raving and finger pointing about who met whom and who said what in this part of the world when rampaging right out of the news pages is a wikileak.

The internet rapscallions passed on cables that implied/inferred/said outright that DUP and Sinn Féin were in direct talks before the iconic 2007 face-to-face. And we wonder why this is news?

You see most people will tell you that Sinn Féin and the DUP talked before 2007. It just happened. However the fact that the party said no contact was sanctioned means that if by chance there was a meeting, then there was deniability.

Hardly the stuff of Watergate...

At least there was some entertainment value at US officials rating Margaret Ritchie in none too pleasant terms and agreeing that the previous Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s ‘Biffo’ (Big ignorant fecker from Offally) nickname was appropriate.

It all leads to one question – what else is being said in confidential memos from other governments around the world.

Methinks we need a makeover for Norn Iron plc and some voice coaching for some of our MLAs...

Now that’s a bit rich!

WHO would have thunk it! MLAs are spending a wee fortune to have someone tell them how much they should be paid.

Now stay with us here, much as you might feel the urge to throw things around and stamp your feet please keep calm and remember there’s always BBC Radio Ulster’s Nolan Show to ring up and harangue.

Last year, the Assembly, not wanting to appear greedy, passed a law that said if and when they set up an independent panel to decide how much they get paid, they had to absolutely, without question, accept what it said.

So despite all their concerns about quangos and arm’s length bodies, MLAs have created a quango to decide how much they will get paid.

The cost to taxpayers will be £100,000+ and for that we’ll get three part-time ‘panellists’ at a cost of £19,000. Doing some simple maths that’s about £6,333.33 per panellist per year for what will probably amount to a day or two per month. Who will these panellists be? We are willing to bet they will be drawn from the hordes of non-executive directors floating from quango to quango in the twilight years of their earning.

The rest of the money will be £60,000 for support staff and £20,000 for specialist advice – for that read management consultant!

According to a BBC report, after the first year, annual costs will drop from £100,000 to £15,000 per year. We haven’t a clue why - although once they’ve said how much the men and women on the Hill are to get in their pay packets, what else will they be doing?

Now, almost certainly this panel will recommend a pay rise, given that MLAs for a long time have noted that colleagues in Scotland and Wales get loads more dosh than they do.

And the genius thing is that they have to, no doubt with heavy heart and much protestation, accept the pay rise: because they passed a law to that effect.

But before you all go “well they work hard and £43,000 isn’t a lot for the work they do” think again.

A fare whack of the MLAs get an additional salary, if they are “office holders”. This additional salary ranges from just over £2K up to a whopping £66k for the FM and dFM.

Ministers get an additional £37k and chairs of committees get over £11k.

No doubt the independent panel will up those rates too.

Before you go any further, have a wee think about the expenses they receive too. For driving into work they get 40p a mile, which means some members pocket several thousand pounds a year. And cyclists aren’t left out, they get 20p per mile for, well we’re not exactly sure what they get it for.

Sure and then there’s the double jobbers...

Let’s face it, being an MLA is hard work, but is it any harder work than a nurse or a teacher? Yeah that is simplistic, but it’s hard not to think that way when the MLAs are going quango crazy to get a pay rise.

Marshall Mathers for Bangor!

THERE can, perhaps be no stranger sentence in the English language that associates North Down with Marshall Bruce Mathers III a.k.a. Eminem.

What will the residents of Cultra, Crawfordsburn, West Bangor and Groomsport make of Eminem – a man alleged to be a foul-mouthed misogynist, with criminal convictions – headlining the Tenants Vital concert in Bangor’s Ward Park?

Last year Ward Park was adorned by the ever so polite nice young men of Snow Patrol, and now the foul mouthed rapper comes to North Down.

It hasn’t arrived yet, but wait for it, there will be predictable cries for Eminem to be banned from, well, the predictable sources.

Some say that the greatest triumph of the DUP was when Ballymena Council managed to ban the innocuous and pleasantly melodious Electric Light Orchestra on the grounds that they would attract "the four Ds Drink, Drugs, Devil and Debauchery”. So what will they make of Eminem?

Goodness only knows what sort of apoplexy TUV leader Jim Allister will slide into trying to link rappers’ potty tongues to Sinn Féin plotting “sordid deals” with the DUP.

Times have moved on since the DUP banned ELO, we have had raves in the Kings Hall and estates around Antrim, we’ve had death metal bands playing all across Norn Iron, but will Eminem be enough to raise the hackles?

However, before the disapproval bounds forth on to The Nolan Show, rips on to newspaper pages and mounts a pulpit, those who are preparing to pontificate should consider two things: Seamus Heaney – Nobel Poet Laureate reckons Eminem is a pretty good wordsmith and secondly, Marshall Mathers knows what it is like to be cast as a cliché.

Just as our politicians can be unfairly stereotyped (we always try to satirise fairly!) so entertainers are too:

“Cause I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn't then why would I say I am?
In the paper, the news, every day I am...”

And, as our politicians sit back of an evening, how many cast aside the tie and suit jacket and consider whether they have become the persona that the public says they should be.

The Allister Employment Scheme

TUV Leader Jim Allister! All hail the Allister Employment Scheme!

In a stroke of absolute genius the one, the only Jim Allister has managed to set up a scheme that guarantees public sector employment of dozens, if not hundreds of humble civil and public servants.

Mr Allister’s cunning plan kicked in almost as soon as he signed up as a Member of the Legislative Assembly – yep that’s the very same one he howled a wee bit about when it was the UUP in charge, and then when his erstwhile DUP friends took charge.

Mr Allister – rather cunningly – has been disguising his employment scheme as “a thorn in the side of the DUP”. Phase one has been to make a lot of noise: always useful in providing cover for the real plan.

Next stage – and here’s the really clever bit, we only wish other MLAs had thought of this – is ask loads and loads of written questions.

These are good because – and it’s not the obvious reason such as getting an answer to cause embarrassment – those questions need answered. The answers come not from the ministers, but from the ranks of civil and public servants who have to dig through records, pull out emails, generate reports, get an Excel spreadsheet together, save it in a format the drones can save in the font that the Assembly uses, and then post it to Mr Allister, and then to its website...phew, that’s a lot of work for a lot of workers.

With barely two working weeks under his belt Mr Allister has lodged more than 10 written questions to the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister alone! At this rate, any hope for cuts in public services will disappear under an avalanche of paperwork and questions, thus ensuring the jobs of many, many people!

Thank you Mr Allister for keeping so many people in employment!

Spin city

THE Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has a definition of what public relations means. It says on its website that PR is:

“…the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.”

This is of course, what each and every new minister seems to be undertaking since they were appointed…

Within 36 hours of taking their Ministerial pledge, there were stories with culture minister Carál Ní Chuilín and education minister John O'Dowd on a double page spread in the Irish News.

Then we had the exclusive BBC interview with new health minister Edwin Poots. Chunks of airtime, despite the wall-to-wall Royal visit down south coverage, were devoted to Minister Poots.

The first part of the CIPR definition of PR is about reputation. So, combined with the quotation above, we have a clear agenda to gain a better reputation for ministers, goodwill towards them and their decisions, and – get this – mutual understanding.

Well that’s all right then. Our ministers will work to make sure that not only are they going to tell us what’s happening through their organised media management, but they are also going to listen to what service users want and need.

We suspect not. In fact, call us cynical (most people do) but the whole exercise of ministers in the media this past week smacks of a concerted effort to make sure that the public recognises their faces.

So who is behind this propaganda effort? (We’ll not dignify it as PR because the charm offensive will die out as soon as hard choices need to be made)

Is it the Executive Information Service? Is it the party’s themselves? Is it the legions of ‘Special’ Advisers?

Whoever it is, we expect that journalists will find that the word ‘goodwill’ shall be dropped from any definition of PR that equates to ministerial communications.

An invidious position

SINN Féin must have been greatly relieved that the visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – or Elizabeth Windsor, if you are from Óglaigh na hÉireann – came after the recent elections.

It has meant that they have not had to face all that awkwardness surrounding the visit of the Queen.

Gerry and his beard have looked particularly uncomfortable; with a sort of ‘not the right time’ and ‘some more apologies from the Brits please’ beginning to sound distinctly churlish in the wake of wall-to-wall coverage.

In fact, some of the coverage passed ‘over-the-top’ on the way to complete and utter overkill.

The media struggled for another commentator to repeat the word ‘historic’ every few seconds of interview time.

Which left the half-hearted dissention of Sinn Féin and the rabid dissidents casting stones and vitriol: and in an ironic twist one of those rabid protestors was wearing the shirt of an English football team…

To a certain extent it was not in Sinn Féin’s interests to make too much of a deal about the Royal visit. Their focus in the Republic is on the economy; and Barack Obama’s advisers look closely at recent statements of political parties before he touches down.

And in Norn Iron Martin McGuinness is shoulder to shoulder with Peter Robinson on their personal agenda of making it all better here in the north.

Obviously Martin couldn’t be seen at the state banquet in Dublin Castle but such is the new found, if tentative, matey-ness of the two that Peter is said to have brought back a wee doggie bag of leftovers for their plotting sessions on the downfall of the UUP and SDLP.

Whether the Queen managed to notice the absence of Sinn Féin at the banquet will remain unknown in line with protocol, but at the Irish National Stud could it have been the case that Sinn Féin like all the other politicians, were waiting for a tip from Her Majesty on the 3.15 race at Chepstow…

Whatever the case, the visit of the Queen leaves Sinn Féin with a dilemma in terms of their public positioning. If they maintain their vocal anti-royalist stance, tying the monarchy into past issues, the public will largely ignore this, or worse still lambast them. If they choose to let the wedding and royal visit furor die down then the hardliners may ask why they have kept relatively quiet.

Whatever the case a wee secret bad part of Gerry and Martin must be hoping for a tabloid royal scandal exposé very soon…

If you’re happy and you know it…

IT’S getting down to business and, in case you doubt it, Peter and Martin are going to tell you that it is so! The new, shiny face of the Norn Iron Executive is that of an executive ready to get down to the hard work of government.

How long the honeymoon period actually lasts is another matter, for as sure as the sun rises and the day darkens at dusk there will be rows and hissy fits.

So in the meantime, there’s a certain sense of knuckling down to the hard tasks. And who said that our ministers must work together? Well it was the electorate according to Peter and Martin.

There was, however, a hint that a window of opportunity exists in the next 18 months or so to get the really awkward decisions taken. Peter did mention that it is three years until the next election.

Compare that to the last two years – a European election, a Westminster election and then May’s double whammy – and it is easy to see that it was difficult to agree on whether the Executive would have tea or coffee let alone agree a budget!

So, with real politics/bread and butter politics [delete as applicable] on the table can we expect all to be sweetness and light? Well, no.

For a start a clear signal has been sent from Minister of Cuts, Sammy Wilson that the hard times are coming down the road. The warnings have been given over the past year and now the stark reality is coming to pass.

Add into that there is the switcherooney planned by the DUP in two years time, with ministers stepping aside for a new tranche of bright-eyed DUP guys.

Translate this simply: the new squad of ministers will not have to bear the blame for the harsh decisions. In two years time, pummelled by cuts and the harsh decisions, the electorate will welcome with open arms the new set of DUP ministers, as they bring light, beneficence and bigger budgets to bear. And, at the same time they can slag off the rest of the Executive.

No doubt their coalition partners, Sinn Féin, will be immune to the battering, but the SDLP and UUP will be firmly in the sights of the DUP ministers. No real change there then!

Welcome back?

IN media circles there was much popping of corks, high fives across newsrooms and celebrations akin to the ending of a long war.

The reason for their success? The election of Mr Jim Allister to the Assembly! It does not matter to the media that Mr Allister’s party was not even close elsewhere in the Assembly elections. It does not matter that Mr Allister was not elected on a wave of popular dissent against the DUP.

What does matter is that they no longer feel awkward about inviting Mr Allister to speak about everything or anything he objected to when he held no democratic mandate.

That of course begs the question as to whether the exposure of Mr Allister in the media in the months leading up to the poll helped or hindered him in the poll. Would another party – let’s say the Green Party, the Worker’s Party or UKIP – have benefitted from similar pre-purdah exposure?

But, Mr Allister now stands as an elected Member of the Legislative Assembly. The media were already hanging on his every utterance as the election of the speaker and his deputies got underway.

As a piece of political theatre it was engrossing, but theatre it was. It added nothing to our understanding of the future path of the individuals, parties or the assembly itself. It did, perhaps, signal to other existing and future MLAs that shouting loudest and stirring an already cooked pot gets the most coverage if not the most progress.