It’s another one of those old chestnuts that keeps on coming up – Northern Ireland’s Presbyterian Sunday opening hours.
Whilst our friends and family a few miles down the road can go shopping in a big store at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, in common with our Scottish cousins and our English mates, we have to twiddle our thumbs until 1 pm and then have to get all our shopping done and dusted by 6 pm by which time we’re presumably supposed to brush our teeth, dust off the dandruff and get ready for our second visit to church that day.
It’s all a bit antiquated, unless you’re an officer of the Lord’s Day Preservation Society, in which case it makes complete sense.
This week, another argument has kicked off over Sunday trading hours, specifically in Belfast city centre, with the City Council set to vote on whether to launch a new pilot scheme to allow big stores in the city to open for longer on Sundays.
It makes sense, one would have thought, for locals who like a spot of shopping, for visitors and for tourists who come here and find everything shut on Sundays, bar a couple of hours in the afternoon. It’s never been a good look and it’s definitely not a selling point.
But what seems like a great idea might not see the light of day. Some of our city fathers, as they used to be called, aren’t that keen. Take the case of Seamas de Faoite of the SDLP.
“The decision to run a council pilot stopping any enforcement against businesses who open early on a Sunday will achieve nothing except increased profits for large multinational retailers,” said Séamas….showing a fundamental disregard for the fact that these companies don’t just make profits (or losses). They are also major employers of his and other’s constituents. They put bread on their tables, Seamas.
Perhaps not surprisingly, trade union USDAW believe that this is “not the right move”. Let’s be honest, anything that involves its members doing any more work wouldn’t be a good move in its book.
But we were a tad disappointed by the reaction from Glyn Roberts of Retail NI. “To deregulate Sunday trading and create another shopping day shows poverty of ambition,” says Glyn. “We need new thinking to animate Sunday morning and offer shoppers and visitors something different.”
Not quite sure what kind of new thinking you have in mind, Glyn. Nor are we convinced that all of your members will hold the same view as you about Sunday trading. Many, one would imagine, would jump at the chance to be able to get a decent return on the Sabbath.
And it’s always worth remembering. Retail, at its very heart, is all about the customers and what they want. After all, they’re always right.
Not Big & Not Clever
The furore over Kneecap, the rap group that we’ve all now heard of, has been consuming the mainstream media this week.
We’d come across Kneecap before now, of course, although not in person. We wouldn’t go to the bottom of the garden to hear one of their gigs. Nothing to do with the politics. Just not really our kind of music.
That the lads are attention-seekers is beyond doubt. They court publicity and they set out to shock to achieve a spot of that publicity. To be fair, the bit about dead Tories and killing MPs might have been meant to get the crowd going, and it also might have been naïve. But it wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever.
So it wasn’t surprising that the tom tit hit the fan, as they might say in London. Mind you, it took a while to hit it. Kneecap’s chap said his controversial line about dead Tories quite a few months back but no one really noticed until now.
Of course, the fact that these guys wear green, white and gold balaclavas and promote the Irish language doesn’t help much in some quarters. Their case has become a political football….now isn’t that a surprise around these parts?
Should they be banned from doing their bit on Belfast City Council property. On balance, is there really any point?
We Three Kings
You do wonder about academics sometimes. Despite always denying it, do they actually live in some kind of parallel universe to the rest of us?
Take yet another recent report, this time from something called the Constitution Unit at University College London, a bunch of people who presumably think of little else other than constitutional matters.
They’ve been exploring options for Stormont reform, God help them, and they’ve been a bit concerned about the current joint nature of the First Minister’s position. Apparently, they say, the current nature of the office ‘operationalises’ the parity of esteem between the unionist and nationalist blocs. Are we all with them so far?
But, the academics say, Northern Ireland society isn’t as ‘binary’ as it used to be. And that, of course, can only be good news.
Their solution to the First Minister problem? They think we should have three of them. Yep, a trio of First Ministers. One from the unionist camp, one from the nationalise side and one – you’ve guessed it – from somewhere in the middle.
God almighty, don’t allow them to do that to us.
Pass The Parcel
The Irish Sea border is back in the news this week, with the advent of new legislation around goods from GB to Northern Ireland.
For the general public, there’ll be no major issues. And the same should apply to the majority of businesses here receiving goods from the across the Irish Sea. Providing firms are registered with the UK Internal Market Scheme (UKIMS), they can use a simplified process.
So it’s not much of a story. On its new bulletins the other day, BBC Northern Ireland treated it as such, with the excellent John Campbell providing one of his trademark handy explainers on air. The very same John Campbell stood in for Stephen Nolan one of his regular holiday breaks last week and did a sterling job. But now he’s back to Economics & Business and Nolan is back behind the mic.
So, of course, it has to be a big deal. Campbell, a guest on the programme this time, tried his best to play it all down. But Nolan was having none of it. He built it up to its inevitable crescendo. Yep, the appearance on the Nolan airwaves yet again of one James Allister, Member of Parliament for Antrim North.
And a very angry man he was, especially when the show’s host changed the subject from sea borders to Kneecap. We could almost feel the heat coming over the radio waves.
He Who Shouts Loudest
The news that 140 or so jobs are under threat with the planned closure of BT’s operation in Derry/Londonderry is unwelcome, and a lot worse than that for anyone who does lose their job as a result.
But it’s not wholly surprising given the way that telecommunications sector has changed over recent years. Do you know anyone, elderly relatives apart, who still has a landline in their home?
It’s the wholesale gnashing of teeth amongst the politicians that caught our eye. Perhaps not surprisingly, People Before Profit’s Shaun Harkin was quick out the blocks. “Targetting the stripping jobs out of Derry is an absolute disgrace,” he fumed. “It’s a decision driven by maximising profits…..”. Erm, where do we start?
We’d expect a more considered response from the area’s MP, Colum Eastwood. He talked about devastating news for workers and families, and rightly so, and promised to be in touch with ‘senior leaders’ at BT.
“Relocating these roles to India and Belfast is a mistake,” said Colum. “It’s a direct transfer of opportunity from our city to other places that do not need it (sic).”
All very well, Colum. We know you’ve got to stick up for your patch. But do they really not need opportunities or jobs in distant lands like India….and Belfast?
Travelling Light
Meanwhile, Eastwood’s colleague Matthew O’Toole, the opposition leader at Stormont, don’t forget, has been trying to stir the pot about the money spent on foreign trips for Executive ministers. And the figures may look dramatic…until you start to think about it.
In the figures supplied to O’Toole, former Economy Minister Conor Murphy was the biggest recipient of paid-for travel and accommodation, to the tune of £72,000 over the year. The First & Deputy First Ministers, Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, notched up an expenditure of £54,000. Communities Minister Gordon Lyons comes into the charts at £42k while Agriculture’s Andrew Muir and Paul Givan at Education bring up the rear at £18k and £15k respectively.
Matthew O’Toole, ever hopeful of a decent headline, accused Stormont’s Ministers of “swanning around the world and staying in opulent hotels” while Northern Ireland’s public service “are in ruin”.
That’s all very well, Matthew. And you got the headlines in some quarters. But think back to the days when Stormont wasn’t working at all and when we all wished for active Ministers who could get out there and represent us on the investment and other fronts?
They can’t do it for nothing. Nor can we reasonably expect them to cross the Atlantic on Air India via Delhi and stay in an Econo Lodge out beside McDonalds.
Apart from anything else, maybe we’re spoilt but the figures didn’t strike us as too bad. Has anyone else booked a decent holiday lately?
Temper, Temper
Let’s finish in the courts where a lady from County Antrim, let’s just say in case she tracks us down and loses her temper, was jailed for a series of offences caused by what appears to be a very bad temper indeed.
Over a couple of months last year and this, our friend screamed at social workers who had visited her home, threw a plastic bottle at their departing car and then embarked on a series of social media posts.
“Every one of you’s better start telling the truth… or I will expose every single one of you”, she said in one post, exposing some grammatial frailties.
Then, outside a court where she had been appearing, she grabbed a social worker “by the hair, tried to trail her to the ground, threatened to kill her, to kill her two-year-old child and to burn her house down”. A second social worker tried to intervene but she was punched in the face for her trouble.
Oh, and she also threatened her own solicitor that she would break all of her windows. But this turned out to be no empty threat.
The lady in question later turned up at the solicitor’s offices armed with a baseball bat and did exactly what she said she was going to do.
According to the media report, when arrested and interviewed, she admitted walking down the street carrying the bat and to smashing the windows, further admitting that had she gained entry she would have smashed the computers too.
Anger management classes, perhaps? Mind you, we wouldn’t fancy being the tutor.