HOUSE prices in Northern Ireland rose almost 10% over the past 12 months, six times faster than the UK average, according to the latest figures from Nationwide.

This is very different to the property boom two decades ago, when soaring prices were accompanied by unprecedented levels of construction.

Up to 15,000 houses were completed every year, half as many again as required to meet long-term need.

Today, construction has fallen to under 6,000 a year, the lowest since the late 1950s. Prices are being forced up by lack of supply, not by exuberant demand.

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Overloaded sewers and a hapless planning system are the primary culprits, although there are other significant problems with the private and social housing sectors.

Rather than a boom that will bust, we are in a squeeze that will keep on squeezing until these problems are fixed.

Even the good news is bad on this front. Northern Ireland remains the most affordable region by some margin – the only part of the UK where the average house costs less than five times the average wage – and we have the fastest-rising wages in the UK.

So we can continue desperately outbidding each other for unavailable housing for the foreseeable future.

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THE chief executive of Sport NI stood down last year, it has emerged, after a two-year absence.

She had previously been dismissed in 2015 and reinstated in 2017, so this saga has lasted over a decade and it is not finished yet – the hunt is still on for a successor.

When dysfunction becomes this protracted, the rights and wrongs of individual disputes scarcely matter compared to the wider impact of a failing public body.

In 2020, an Audit Office report found governance problems at Sport NI had cost the taxpayer £1.5m. Nor is this an isolated case.

Other quangos have seized up for years due to internal arguments and the inability of Stormont departments and other watchdogs to resolve them.

The Department of Finance has overall responsibility for the rules governing arms-length bodies. It needs to develop a ‘special measures’ system for failing quangos, so sponsoring departments can quickly step in and take over.

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Jo Bamford, owner of Ballymena bus-builders Wrightbus, has said it is a “national scandal” that Scotland is using public money to buy buses from China rather than from the UK.

This is a daringly protectionist position for a company that exports to public transport operators across the world, including Hong Kong.

While it does not export to mainland China, it exports from mainland China. Last year it formed a partnership with two Chinese firms to manufacture a new range of electric trucks and buses for sale to the UK and Europe.

If the Scottish government put in an order, would Wrightbus say no?

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DUP councillors in Ards and North Down have proposed a bridge between Strangford and Portaferry.

They were furious when the council’s only nationalist representative, Joe Boyle of the SDLP, pointed out this is unrealistic and efforts would be better spent lobbying Stormont to improve the ferry service, especially in morning rushing hour – “a practical, deliverable step”.

Cllr Boyle is to be commended for putting pragmatism before grandstanding.

It is a pity his party has not taken the same attitude to the All-Ireland Strategic Rail Review, whose absurdity lies somewhere between a bridge to Strangford and a bridge to Scotland.

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A giant battery is to be built in Islandmagee by Cookstown-based Solo Renewables, backed with a £100 million investment from Switzerland.

The 2029 completion date is too late for the looming energy crisis but that should still raise interest in the project, which will help store and release power from windmills and other intermittent sources.

This is the first large long-term battery to be built on the island of Ireland and it is really very large indeed – more than publicity and media coverage has managed to convey.

It will be able to discharge 150MW over eight hours, equivalent to one quarter the output of Ballylumford or Kilroot power stations, which each supply about half Northern Ireland’s electricity.

Its storage capacity is roughly the same as the hydroelectric dam cancelled in Camlough at the start of the Troubles and 40% the capacity of the £1 billion dam being proposed in Carrickfergus by Mutual Energy, owner of the electricity cable from Scotland.

The battery will be built beside where Mutual’s cable comes ashore.

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Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced she is scrapping Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs) in England and Wales. Policing should be about “cutting crime”, not questioning people over “insults and routine arguments”, she said.

Free speech campaigners say this makes NCHIs unsustainable in Northern Ireland, but their calls for reform have already caused circular buck-passing.

Alliance justice minister Naomi Long has said it is a matter for the PSNI, while the PSNI has said any change “would involve consultation with stakeholders, including the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the Department of Justice”.

This ambiguity exists because NCHIs have no statutory basis here or in Scotland.They are just a national policing policy, developed by former home secretaries and police chiefs.

Mahmood can only abolish them in England and Wales because her Tory predecessor, Priti Patel, passed a law in 2022 giving her the power to do so.

There is no sign of Mrs Long or anyone else considering similar legislation here and no time in the current assembly term to pass it anyway.

The PSNI could probably do without the bother of recording almost 1,000 non-crimes a year but it will consider abolition too political to force through on its own.

We will be stuck with this nonsense for some time yet.

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Queen’s University Belfast has launched a study into the “surprisingly high” number of mosquitoes in Northern Ireland and any diseases they might carry.

There have always been more mosquitoes here than widely realised but if the study finds numbers have increased, one cause could be the ecological collapse of Lough Neagh.

In a BBC interview two years ago, environmental scientist Dr Les Gornall noted the Lough Neagh fly had disappeared and warned it could be replaced by “Scottish biting midges or mosquitoes”.

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After four years of consultation and deliberation, the Department for Infrastructure has announced it will not ban cars from a short stretch of road through the new Ulster University campus in Belfast.

A department spokesperson said traffic has “continued to flow well since the opening of the campus” – a revealing statement, as the proposal was supposedly about safety and a pleasanter environment for 15,000 students.

The department proposed the ban itself. Having farcically failed to pedestrianise Hill Street on the other side of the campus, it never going to close a city centre thoroughfare. This has all been a posturing waste of everyone’s time.

Students were among those who engaged in good faith with the consultation. It is surprising, at least to someone my age, that there is no sign of them taking direct action. My contemporaries would simply have blocked the road.

Perhaps tuition fees foster a more responsible attitude in today’s students. Or perhaps the difference is that so many students now have cars.

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