THE WEEK THAT WAS….
After two weeks of soaking up the sun in the Med it’s nice to come home and find that the Northern Ireland Assembly is reassuringly consistent. The debates are still as tedious as they were last session, Question Time has as much punch as a Punch & Judy show which has undergone an equality impact assessment and the Office of First Minister & Deputy First Minister seems to be in the last throes of a Relate course run by Pete and Jordan.
One can tell that things are somewhat strained at Stormont Castle judging by the number of high profile visitors due in the Province. Gordon Brown is coming next week and the US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, is due the week after (if our problems are considered worse than the Prime Minister’s – he’s even managed to surpass Michael Foot’s unpopularity with the voters – it’s time to reach for the tin hats). The NI Secretary of State, Shaun Woodward, is also muttering darkly from the sidelines that Northern Ireland is about to commit economic hari-kiri if we don’t sort out the devolution of Policing & Justice.
Relationships between FM & DFM evidently aren’t good; witness Mr. McGuinness’s reaction to Mr. Robinson’s speech at Stakeholder’s ‘Evolve’ event and the DUP’s wish list to reform the workings of Stormont. The DFM accused his ‘colleague’ of spending too much time in the sun (which, to be fair, probably isn’t that far off the mark if you’ve seen any pics of the sun-kissed First Minister after his Florida vacation).
Just to warm things up for the weekly Executive Meeting on Thursday, Mr. McGuinness suggested that Peter was getting ‘cold feet’ over policing issues and that they hadn’t been able to develop a “close working relationship”. An irked First Minister accused his ‘colleague’ of making a “one sided nasty attack”. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
The two men did, however, manage to hold their smiles recently for a visit to movie director, Martin Scorcese, the man behind the ‘Gangs of New York’, the story of vicious tribal fighting between British and Irish immigrants in 19th Century America. Hmmm, wonder if was inspired to make a modern day sequel. ‘Handbags of Belfast’ possibly?
