Away from the electioneering, two major issues have come to the fore away from politicians:
1. The disaster in the health system where Daisy Hill is just a symptom
2. The swingeing cuts in education.
All hailed the Bengoa report which was the agreed way forward. It and all previous reports on health proposed that the number of acute hospitals should be reduced to just four which would have scrapped Daisy Hill A&E. We can't have it every way, we don't have the resources to have local A&E departments. Health is ring fenced and only gets 3% when it needs 5% to stand still without any increase in services. The likely closure of Daisy Hill has happened when the politicians are offside and not by coincidence, it is to their advantage that administrators do the work they should be doing if they were up to the job and running the country. BTW the problems in Daisy Hill are long running and the Health Minister had turned her face away from dealing with them before shutting down government.
The cuts in education are real and are probably closer to 7 or 8% in real terms and exist for one reason, i.e. the mitigation of welfare reform cuts has cost so much that the budget for them has been increased by 9% in cash terms. This had to be taken from somewhere and education, agriculture, economy, infrastructure and justice have all been reduced to pay for not implementing the welfare reform. Again this works in favour of SF-DUP coalition as it maintains their mitigation of welfare but the civil servants get the blame for taking the additional cost from the education and the other areas.
RHI and the respect agenda was a fig leaf for the failure of the DUP-SF to be able to produce a budget for 2017-18 by pulling down the assembly and handing over the problem to the UK government and civil servants. Why do you think that DUP handed over the finance ministry to SF having carefully guarded it for so long to keep it anyway from nationalist and republican rouges and renegades? It was a poisoned chalice that was too hot to handle (i know mixed metaphors) and the only way out was to pull down the assembly for something that had not been a problem only a matter of weeks before. How would it play in Dublin when a SF finance minister implemented severe cuts to public services when its TD had and continued to harangue FG for its cuts in the RoI?
At some stage people in N.Ireland need to wake up and see that the cuts are real, inevitable, not the fault of Brokenshire or the civil servants, the budget cannot meet all of our needs. If politicians prevent welfare cuts by taking so much from other budgets, we must expect cuts elsewhere even if they didn't have the courage to tell everyone this would happen.
1. The disaster in the health system where Daisy Hill is just a symptom
2. The swingeing cuts in education.
All hailed the Bengoa report which was the agreed way forward. It and all previous reports on health proposed that the number of acute hospitals should be reduced to just four which would have scrapped Daisy Hill A&E. We can't have it every way, we don't have the resources to have local A&E departments. Health is ring fenced and only gets 3% when it needs 5% to stand still without any increase in services. The likely closure of Daisy Hill has happened when the politicians are offside and not by coincidence, it is to their advantage that administrators do the work they should be doing if they were up to the job and running the country. BTW the problems in Daisy Hill are long running and the Health Minister had turned her face away from dealing with them before shutting down government.
The cuts in education are real and are probably closer to 7 or 8% in real terms and exist for one reason, i.e. the mitigation of welfare reform cuts has cost so much that the budget for them has been increased by 9% in cash terms. This had to be taken from somewhere and education, agriculture, economy, infrastructure and justice have all been reduced to pay for not implementing the welfare reform. Again this works in favour of SF-DUP coalition as it maintains their mitigation of welfare but the civil servants get the blame for taking the additional cost from the education and the other areas.
RHI and the respect agenda was a fig leaf for the failure of the DUP-SF to be able to produce a budget for 2017-18 by pulling down the assembly and handing over the problem to the UK government and civil servants. Why do you think that DUP handed over the finance ministry to SF having carefully guarded it for so long to keep it anyway from nationalist and republican rouges and renegades? It was a poisoned chalice that was too hot to handle (i know mixed metaphors) and the only way out was to pull down the assembly for something that had not been a problem only a matter of weeks before. How would it play in Dublin when a SF finance minister implemented severe cuts to public services when its TD had and continued to harangue FG for its cuts in the RoI?
At some stage people in N.Ireland need to wake up and see that the cuts are real, inevitable, not the fault of Brokenshire or the civil servants, the budget cannot meet all of our needs. If politicians prevent welfare cuts by taking so much from other budgets, we must expect cuts elsewhere even if they didn't have the courage to tell everyone this would happen.
