Stakeholder

OVER the past three weeks I have been on two continents – America and Asia. Travel is a useful reminder that the world does not revolve around Northern Ireland.

Turmoil suited our politicians. Peace and normality does not.

Once they strode the world stage with presidents and statesmen. Now they must make do with policing and sewers.

The reality of normal politics is setting in and the people with their hands on the reins of power appear ill at ease with the responsibility.

When the executive launched, it did so with great aplomb. The Great Hall at Stormont was filled with the great, the good and the ‘toga touchers’. Now the Great Hall is a great tourist site competing for school visits against Belfast Zoo, the Ulster Museum and Crumlin Road Prison. Funny, when you think of the antics the inmates of all four may share.

The executive never seemed comfortable with tough decisions. From the start it ducked anything that had to do with the implementing of taxation. After being beaten into government by Peter Hain’s threat to implement water charges, the administration went into the mode of the ‘tick man’ with everything not being charged going on the wacky economics of the ‘never-never’.

All parties stated quite clearly there would not be water charges. Not on separate bills and not on one bill because they said we already paid for water. Deep down they and we knew that, while that was technically true, we clearly weren’t paying enough but the theatrics of united opposition was worthy of pantomime. Jack and the Beanstalk really – only without the benefit of the magic beans.

Soon to follow was the freeze on domestic rates and the exemption for manufacturing business. Then of course, free prescriptions. Not forgetting the people who got a £1,000 cheque for not having home insurance when their homes flooded. Well truth be told, they could have had insurance as they got the £1,000 anyway.

May your giving hand never stop was the catch-call. Only later in the year did we realise that politicians were only giving a kickback on the massive public subsidies they were already receiving via our taxes.

Why not get a contribution towards your flat-screen 46-inch TV – if your MP was billing you for their curtain swags, picture framing, home redecoration, new blinds and gardening services?

But as your granny used to say, you can watch a thief but you can’t watch a liar. The expenses debacle nearly caught out most politicians but now it’s their words that are catching up on them.

Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister is having a field day by feeding back to the DUP that party’s own pledges and promises and boy, is it giving the DUP indigestion.

The fact that his own menu is somewhat lacking in variety and taste does not seem to bother his supporters.

It seems as if some former DUP supporters did not realise that they were playing the peace lottery – let alone that Paisley had been buying tickets for months.

The DUP now wants to change the rules governing the administration of the executive. In effect, it wants a St Andrews Agreement mark II.

Sinn Fein is not pleased. Not surprising given the mess it made of it from a nationalist perspective at St Andrews I.

Though Sinn Fein has problems too. Water charges are needed before the entire system collapses but Conor Murphy is ploughing a lonely political field when he calls for their implementation.

Yet the real problems lie with the education minister. Her department is totally dysfunctional mainly due to her and that’s not a media myth.

The minister is full of saccharine and short on substance. She is completely unable to convince anyone but her most loyal of colleagues of her policies.

Surely someone in Sinn Fein knows that she is damaging not only her party but her department and the education system in Northern Ireland. She is driven by a mistaken and misguided commitment to a flawed policy.

The SDLP should be capitalising on the fact that this is the weakest link in Sinn Fein. Its failure to do so is a reflection of the SDLP’s shared myopia on an issue that is core to the heartland of its own supporters.

The SDLP is well used to creating test-tube policies in the confines of student union bars and in the coffee houses of south Belfast – it’s high time the party focused on a target and got a political scalp.