A Handy Coincidence
Peter Robinson must be the envy of fellow MPs. Bad luck to have your constituency hit by flash floods. But good luck to be the Finance Minister, able to put your hand in your pocket to alleviate some of the hardship. Of course six to eight council areas have been affected, and the Environment Minister Arlene Foster will have to distribute the new £5 million flooding disaster fund fairly between them. But it's a fact that East Belfast bore the brunt, and Mr Robinson must be happy that restoring devolution has meant that he can do more than just complain about his constituents' plight.
The Finance Minister is less happy about what he regards as the "direct rule mindset" of some of his fellow ministers who he believes approach every problem on their patch by asking for a handout. He thinks that instead
of giving a knee jerk response to every lobby group and demanding cash, ministers should come up with an imaginative solution. Such as? Well Finance Department sources point to the sale of the Crossnacreevy agricultural research site by Sinn Fein's Michelle Gildernew as an ingenious approach to solving a problem over funding slurry tanks, despite criticism from the Ulster Farmers Union.
So Peter Robinson thinks Michelle did okay, even though his former colleague Jim Allister accused her of selling off the Agriculture Department's family silver.
On a wider level, the Finance Minister warns of inevitable tensions between social based priorities and economic growth and points out that the Irish Republic suffered some short term pain in order to deliver long term gain. With no sign of a Gordon Brown pot of gold, this sounds like a warning of some tough times ahead, whether or not this monsoon weather continues.
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When the ministers appeared on TV after the floods, they all said the same thing - we don't have the sewerage and waste water infrastructure to cope with heavy rain like we just had.
So how do we pay for the infrastructure that is needed? Hmm...let me think...surely it can't be water charges? All the parties are opposed to them, aren't they?
The executive better get their imaginations working. How much would they get for Stormont?
And there was more than a whiff of "water charges are inevitable" when the ministers appeared before the cameras after meeting the lady from the water board.
Easy to oppose when you don't have to make the decisions, eh?