Following on from my previous post looking at the runners and riders for the local government election, I’ll now drill down in a bit more detail to look at each council and some of the key races. In a previous post I spoke about how all the parties will be telling us how they want our votes, but in reality no party in the 2014 election stood in every single DEA, meaning that not everyone who wanted to vote for …
Plan A or plan B? Deal or no deal? The Parties (DUP / SF) are at a fork in the road. All clichés that have been bandied about since last week when there was a faint glimmer of hope that there would be some sort of resolution to the talks that apparently have been ongoing at Stormont. I say apparently, because unlike previously, there has been very little said publicly about what is going on. In the leaky sieve that …
I took the end of last week for half term. That meant minimal social media, no newspapers and not watching or listening to the news. It was a happy couple of days in a little bubble known as the real world. In that world, there is very little inkling that there is an election coming up. Imagine! Even when out and about, Lagan Valley is a poster-free zone so how normal voters who aren’t generally about to watch political programmes …
This week saw Mitchell McLaughlin elected as Speaker of the Assembly. The News Letter pointed to his previous comments refusing to accept that the murder of Jean McConville was a crime. Leaving aside McLaughlin personally there is a certain symbolism in a Sinn Fein speaker being elected just a week before the 34th anniversary of the murder of the old Stormont speaker Sir Norman Stronge. Sir Norman was born in 1894 and fought at the Somme. His election as speaker …
An Ulster Unionist MLA once described Green Party leader Steven Agnew to me as a younger Jim Allister with longer hair and less talent. That has often looked harsh but maybe true. However Sam McBride in the News Letter has an excellent piece quoting Agnew on the more fundamental causes of the current financial crisis at Stormont: The North Down MLA said: “The fantasy they peddled was that you can get more services but pay less – that is simply …
Nero is said to have been killed (albeit at his own request – or he may have committed suicide) by his private secretary Epaphroditos. David Ford’s (aka little Nero) solo run to change the rules for appointing the new Chief Constable has been slapped down by the Policing Board. From the BBC: At a meeting on Thursday, board members agreed to formally reject the justice minister’s proposal and told Mr Ford it intends to use the existing rules to recruit …
We now have a new contender to add to the collection of misjudged, irrational and counter-productive legislative initiatives; the 2013 Planning Bill. This began as a relatively well-intentioned attempt to tweak the current planning system in advance of handing over most planning powers to the new local authorities in 2015. However this has evolved into a farce through a number of ill-conceived interventions made jointly by Sinn Féin and the DUP. First, they would not let it through the Executive …
We’ll be launching the full set of categories for the Slugger Awards later this morning, but Chris Donnelly makes something of a pitch for two extraordinary come backs over the last year. Gerry Adams, who this time last year was plunged into a personal and political crisis over the allegation by his niece that he’d known of her accusations of abuse against his brother and had done nothing to help. This was followed in fairly short order by a Spotlight …
