THE DUP has blocked the introduction of minimum alcohol pricing by UUP health minister Mike Nesbitt, claiming that evidence for its effectiveness is inconclusive.

This is curious nit-picking from a party that once damned the Devil’s buttermilk.

Former DUP health minister Jim Wells has said that when he tried to introduce the same policy a decade ago, he encountered resistance within his party due to lobbying from the drinks industry and concern about the reaction in “loyalist, working-class communities”.

This may not be an isolated phenomenon.

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Gambling in Northern Ireland is regulated by the DUP-controlled Department for Communities, which might be expected to take a dim view of casting pearls before swine. The party says it wants to align with recent gambling reforms in Britain.

Yet so far it has only copied over the reforms the industry likes, such as higher stakes and prizes, but not the reforms it does not like, such as an independent regulator and a gambling levy.

What are the odds of that?

John Manley: DUP opposition to minimum unit pricing for alcohol doesn’t stack upOpens in new window

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After 12 months of consultation and deliberation on how developers might help fund the water system, Sinn Féin infrastructure minister Liz Kimmins has announced they can make voluntary contributions.

This hardly differs from long-standing practice, so what has all the deliberation been about?

In April 2024, two months after devolution was restored, the then Sinn Féin infrastructure minister, John O’Dowd, proposed mandatory developer contributions as an alternative to water charging.

By September he was clarifying this would only be a “small part” of the solution, although he added serious work on it was underway.

This was contradicted in February 2025 by NI Water, which said there had been no “substantive discussions” on the proposal.

The Irish general election, which Sinn Féin had been expecting to win, was in November 2024.

A cynic might suspect the party wanted a painless answer to water and housing – problems common to north and south – until it was safely in office in the Republic.

Instead, it found itself with three more years of governing only at Stormont, apparently with little idea on how to do so.

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The privatisation of policing in central Belfast has taken another step forward.

A private company, Legacy Link, has already provided foot patrols since 2024.

Its uniformed ‘business protection officers’ make hourly visits to businesses who sign up to a subscription service.

Now business groups across the city centre have commissioned a London-based non-profit company, Safer Business Network, to help with crime reduction strategies, including investigations and prosecutions.

The most striking aspect of its approach is the focus on persistent offenders.

It is revealing that when people are paying for policing out of their own pocket they immediately zero in on the small number of criminals who commit the vast majority of offences.

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Only 27 written questions were tabled last year by the 19-member Policing Board, The Irish News has discovered.

This is supposedly the main mechanism by which senior PSNI officers are held to account.

Half the questions were from one of the nine independent members. The 10 political party members tabled just 14 questions between them, with several asking none and Sinn Féin’s three members asking only a combined total of two.

Parties qualify for the board by their assembly strength. People Before Profit, which does not qualify, says hard-won scrutiny powers are being “squandered”.

This has an absurd flip-side. Alliance justice minister Naomi Long receives around 10 written assembly questions per month about policing.

She has to respond to each one by reminding MLAs she has no operational control over the PSNI and questions should be put to the chief constable at the Policing Board.

How can anyone at Stormont still not know how this? Policing and justice have been devolved for 16 years.

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The only part of the criminal justice system not completely independent of ministers is the Prison Service.

So Mrs Long can legitimately share the credit for a glowing inspection report into Magilligan, declaring it “one of the very best prisons in the United Kingdom”.

Its performance was ranked as “reasonable” when justice was devolved in 2010.

Northern Ireland’s two other prisons have improved more dramatically over the same period, albeit after an initial serious decline.

Maghabbery has gone from a crisis rating in 2015 to “good”; Hydebank from a failing rating in 2013 to “a model of excellence”.

This gives us the highest-rated prison system in the UK and Ireland – perhaps the single clearest example of a major public service improvement under devolution.

But few people have direct experience of the prison system or care about those within it, so this success comes with no electoral reward.

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A pedestrian and cycle bridge over the Lagan in Belfast is among the major projects to be halted by the Department for Infrastructure due to the A5 court case.

John Walsh, the chief executive of Belfast City Council, has accused the department of “making no sense”.

That might be true by any understanding of common sense, but it makes perfect sense by the logic of the Climate Change Act.

The Enniskillen bypass and A1 junction upgrades have been halted because construction is a significant part of a road’s total emissions over its typical 50-year lifespan: up to a quarter, and more in some cases. The planned move to electric vehicles will increase this proportion further.

For walking and cycling infrastructure, construction accounts for effectively all lifespan emissions.

Box-ticking exercises may well have had to be adjusted to stop the Lagan bridge scoring lower than a dual-carriageway.

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So few children cycle to school that Stormont’s statistics agency has stopped reporting it.

The latest annual school travel survey offers only combined figures for walking and cycling: 27% for primary pupils and 18% for secondary pupils.

Last year’s survey reported 1% of primary and secondary pupils cycling. Previous years rounded the cycling figures down to 0%, but even that is no longer be possible.

If these reports were from the Department for Infrastructure, which has targets for cycling to school, it might be suspected of hiding its embarrassment. But the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency has no dog in this fight.

In a note attached to the latest report, it explains the figures have been combined “to avoid issues with disclosure”. In other words, schoolchildren on bicycles have become so rare there is a risk of individuals being identified.

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Nationalism is having another of its periodic arguments with itself about the conditions for a border poll.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has indicated reconciliation should happen first. Mary Lou McDonald has condemned this as outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Sinn Féin president is correct, but she does not have a leg to stand on while her party is demanding a date for a poll, also outside the terms of the Agreement.

Reconciliation could be said to be required by ‘the spirit of the Agreement’, as the word appears eight times in its text.

Would anyone fall for such blatant sophistry? Surely not.

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