Newton Emerson: Stormont’s tedious Brexit debate leaves public cold

Stormont’s consent vote on the sea border is a mechanism created in 2020 by the original Brexit protocol.

Although it was always known that the first of the four-yearly votes would be a foregone conclusion, it was still considered a matter of serious significance with the potential to be highly destabilising.

Many people involved in Northern Ireland politics, at Stormont and beyond, have been deeply concerned about it for years.

Yet when the first vote finally took place this week it was a non-event, with the media struggling to generate much interest. It turns out that even Northern Ireland has a limit to its interest in predictable arguments and Brexit has reached it.

Unionists have pulled the Stormont brake, but there’s no need for it to create a crisis - The Irish News view

Newton Emerson: The Department for Infrastructure is failing – is it simply too big to function?

Bizarrely, the angriest scenes during the tedious six-hour debate were between Alliance and lone TUV MLA Timothy Gaston, who accused Naomi Long’s party of being allied with nationalists and republicans.

This may be an effective tactic for winding Alliance up but as a long-term strategy for unionism it could hardly be more counter-productive.

In that respect, Gaston’s contribution was only too appropriate.

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The executive has agreed a housing supply strategy with a target of 100,000 new private and social homes over the next 15 years.

DUP communities minister Gordon Lyons has produced the 39-page document, which requires other departments to deliver improvements in planning, water treatment, use of public land and of course funding.

Lack of new money might seem like the strategy’s most obvious flaw but the executive has credible options to find it.

A more revealing problem is Lyons’s comments on the need for smaller, more accessible homes, in addition to traditional family homes, to cope with an ageing population and other social and demographic changes.

This is exactly why the so-called bedroom tax was mitigated under the 2015 Fresh Start agreement. That deal was supposed to buy time for strategies to build more such property in the private and social sectors.

How much progress has been made on it in the decade since? Take a wild guess.

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After the 2022 hoax bomb threat to Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney, the PSNI put loyalists under surveillance.

Two men, Winston Irvine and Robin Workman, were caught with guns and ammunition and have pleaded guilty to possession under suspicious circumstances.

Irvine was a prominent figure in peace-building and paramilitary transition projects. His plea has raised fresh concerns over the amount of time and public money lavished on persuading loyalists to become law-abiding citizens.

For perspective on this issue, it helps to remember that the principal victim of the 2022 incident was not Coveney but the person whose van was hijacked near the Shankill Road to transport the hoax bomb. He was told his family would be shot, leaving him traumatised.

Controlled explosions destroyed his van and equipment, ruining his livelihood. After he withdrew his testimony, prosecutors alleged he had been intimidated.

Loyalists prey on the law-abiding people we are supposedly paying them to become and their own communities bear the highest cost of all.

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It has been widely reported that the Department for Infrastructure is advising people to work from home one day per week due to traffic chaos in central Belfast.

This has provoked criticism and ridicule, yet it is not official advice. It was an observation by a senior departmental official, Colin Woods, while musing on Radio Ulster’s Stephen Nolan show about what might reduce congestion.

Woods was defending the department on air, a highly irregular position in which to place a civil servant. Sinn Féin minister John O’Dowd was unavailable, presumably because of his party’s petulant boycott of Nolan’s programmes.

There are plenty of infrastructure officials who can be criticised for the way they do their jobs but none should face criticism for the way they do O’Dowd’s job. He should try doing it himself.

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Good news for the former Sinn Féin assembly employee who vandalised a painting at Belfast City Hall.

The PSNI has been investigating an offence of criminal damage with a hate motivation after the portrait of a DUP mayor, Lord Wallace Brown, was damaged during a reception in October for an Irish language group.

The group condemned the incident and the culprit, the son of a Sinn Féin MLA, was suspended and resigned.

Reports at the time suggested the damage might have been significant, with the portrait removed from the wall and its glass smashed. The average cost of a mayoral portrait at Belfast is £15,000 and any criminal damage over £5,000 is a serious offence, potentially triable at the Crown Court.

However, the council has announced the portrait is back on display after requiring only “minor repair”.

That would make it a matter for a magistrate. If the damage is under £200, it could be dealt with by a fixed penalty notice.

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Alliance has acceded to an indefinite ban on puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria. The decision, made at the executive, follows the Cass Review recommendation against use of the drugs.

Sinn Féin dropped its support for puberty blockers in August when it approved a temporary ban, but this is the first time Alliance has reversed its position.

There may be tensions within the party as it moves to keep up with the science and politics of transgender medicine.

Last week, apparently with the full support of his party, Alliance deputy leader Eoin Tennyson published plans for a private member’s bill that would criminalise any counselling or treatment “aimed at changing or suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity”.

His proposal said “these acts conflict with clear medical evidence that it is not possible to bring about such change”.

For sexual orientation, yes; for gender identity, the Cass Review found gender-affirming care is “disconnected from clinical evidence”.

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Sinn Féin is furiously denouncing the EU’s new trade deal with South America, claiming “it will incentivise the further deforestation and destruction of the Amazon and will put huge pressure on Irish farmers”.

This is disappointing supremacism towards the global south. Almost all Ireland’s farmland was created by destroying a temperate rainforest. What would Sinn Féin say if Brazil demanded it be grown back?

There has been particular indignation from Chris Hazzard, MP for South Down, Venezuela and the Students’ Union, who has complained of “destruction of delicate Amazonian ecosystems”.

If he looks out of his Castlewellan constituency office he might see the barren slopes of the Mournes – not a natural wilderness as often assumed but a landscape devastated by sheep farming.

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