CHIEF constable Jon Boutcher has told a cross-border policing conference that the number of Catholic officers in the PSNI “isn’t good enough”.

Asked by journalists if 50/50 recruitment should resume, he said he wants to use the organisation’s 25th anniversary this year to “have a proper debate about recruitment policy”.

By law, restarting 50/50 is a decision for the secretary of state, Hilary Benn, in consultation with the chief constable and the Policing Board. So Mr Boutcher has put the ball in Mr Benn’s court.

Political parties have seats on the board in proportion to their assembly strength but they hold only 11 of the 20 seats in total and there are no community vetoes, so a majority for 50/50 there could be easily reached.

Denis Bradley: Thank you John Taylor for transforming the Irish unity debate

Although Mr Benn may still balk at over-riding unionist objections, the true obstacle may now be legal rather than political.

Since the 50/50 legislation was enacted, equality and human rights laws have been more strictly interpreted against positive discrimination, including in police recruitment.

The Windsor Framework adds a further complication to suspending these laws, as 50/50 requires, while the devolution of policing and justice in 2010 makes Benn’s absolute discretion appear outdated.

If the policy was brought back, it is quite likely a court would strike it down.

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AS-levels are to be scrapped in Northern Ireland as part of a wider shake-up of examinations and the curriculum.

DUP education minister Paul Givan says the change is partly to address “practices like using AS results to gate-keep Year 14 entry”.

Some schools remove pupils half-way through sixth form to manipulate their position on the league tables.

It is usually impossible to join another school in year 14, forcing these pupils to either abandon their A-levels or restart them from scratch.

However, this practice is already a serious breach of Department of Education guidelines and repeated ministerial directions. Schools still do it anyway.

There is a parallel with the school uniform law Mr Givan passed last month – a desperately elaborate attempt to enforce guidelines ignored for decades.

The department is also routinely ignored or bypassed on academic selection, admissions policies, sex education, religious education, pupil discipline, special needs provision, complaint handling and use of mobile phones.

No other fully taxpayer-funded universal public service gets away with this level of disobedience. Why are schools an exception?

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DUP communities minister Gordon Lyons is facing calls to rethink his position on alcohol licensing.

Licences change hands for significant sums – typically £150,000 – because their number has been fixed throughout Northern Ireland’s history, meaning one outlet must close for another to open.

Last November, an independent review commissioned by Lyons’s department recommended scrapping this system but the minister dismissed it, with some publicans lobbying him to say they would be driven out of business by competition and the collapse of their licence values.

Other publicans have begun lobbying to make the opposite point: the sector will die if it continues to be strangled by a system that blocks new entrants.

Wiping out a £150,000 asset for a small business is no minor matter, but taxi deregulation in Dublin shows it can be done.

In 2000, the Irish government scrapped the city’s fixed number of taxi licences, cutting their value overnight from around £100,000 to zero.

Although a limited hardship fund was set up, no compensation was offered. Two decades of legal action followed but drivers lost every case.

The courts found that a licence is not really an asset. It is merely a permit whose resale value the government has no obligation to protect.

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Junction upgrades on the A1 are the latest road project to fall foul of Stormont’s climate change targets.

More precisely, they have fallen foul of a court case over those targets.

The long-planned £130m scheme is to replace gap junctions with flyovers along a 15-mile section.

It has been paused by Sinn Fein infrastructure minister Liz Kimmins while her department appeals last year’s ruling against the A5. She paused the Enniskillen bypass last month for the same reason.

The A5 and the bypass will primarily be new roads. Safety improvements to an existing road might seem to raise few environmental concerns.

But flyovers are large constructions and construction is considered to represent a significant share of a road’s total lifetime emissions – as much as half for a dual-carriageway.

So even this cannot be done until the targets are changed, scrapped or fudged.

On average, the A1’s gap junctions kill three people every year.

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South Belfast residents have launched a petition to stop a community garden being dug up to build a GAA pitch.

Sinn Féin has rushed through the decision at Belfast City Council, which owns the land. Nevertheless, the council was quite specific when it offered the land for community use two years ago that it was a short-term arrangement.

There have been several prominent examples in recent years of property owners in Belfast, both public and private, offering land and buildings for temporary social use only to encounter resistance when they need their property back.

Admittedly, owners get something out of their generosity. Keeping a site occupied can reduce rates, deter vandalism and head off multiple other problems with decay and dereliction.

But all of that will count for little if owners fear temporary use becoming permanent. It already feels like this gift horse has been looked in the mouth once too often.

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Sinn Féin and the DUP have been accused by other parties of causing deadlock at Belfast City Council by increasingly deploying the call-in mechanism, the equivalent of Stormont’s petition of concern.

Sinn Féin has used it against an expansion of Roselawn Crematorium and the DUP against a new bylaw on busking – subjects the cross-community protection was never intended to block.

This is a consequence of the Palestinian flag row at City Hall late last year.

Sinn Féin tried to bypass the mechanism to get the flag up, so unionists explored its limits to get the flag down – and discovered there probably are no limits under current law.

Any 15% of councillors can call in anything and any 20% can then block it.

This applies to all councils. Ards and North Down is the only council where the local minority holds fewer than 15% of the seats.

Business could soon become deadlocked everywhere else.

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More details have emerged on how the government unlawfully blocked a grant to Kneecap in 2024.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, then the business secretary, exchanged emails with the NIO and Whitehall’s culture department, complaining the west Belfast band opposed the United Kingdom’s existence and therefore should not receive £14,250 under the Music Export Growth Scheme, intended to promote British music abroad.

What Ms Badenoch should have done, of course, was to embrace Kneecap as a great UK success story, then affected wounded innocence if the band objected. This is hilariously subversive, as shown last year when Brighton punk duo the Lambrini Girls received £15,000 from the same fund.

They were outraged when Labour culture secretary Lisa Nandy described recipients as “the best of British culture”, saying they were “embarrassed to be English” and calling Britain “a colonial s***hole”.

But they refused to give the money back, insisting they needed it for a European tour, a stance that made them look increasingly ridiculous.

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