The latest plan to expand Ulster University at Magee has been criticised by the Derry Universities Group (DUG), which campaigns for an independent university in the city.
It wants an independent body to oversee expansion but its most eye-catching proposal is for tuition fees to be waived until student numbers reach Stormont’s 10,000 target.
This would be implausibly expensive: £66 million a year, on top of the £27m Stormont spends subsidising half-price tuition for the 6,000 students in Derry today.
The expansion plan requires a further £50m a year over the next seven years to develop the campus.
In reality, the burden of subsidised fees is the problem with university expansion in Northern Ireland, not the solution.
Fees should rise so Stormont can get out of the way and let universities fund their own growth.
Although DUG can be somewhat eccentric, it is correct to identify attracting students to Derry as at least as much of a challenge as providing places.
Any serious sums made available for this should not be thrown at a grossly inefficient giveaway.
They should be invested in the public realm and general infrastructure of the city to make it a more attractive place for everyone to live.
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Decision-making at Stormont has just become even more difficult, thanks to the Supreme Court.
When ministers take a decision that is significant, controversial or cuts across the remit of other ministers, they have a duty to bring it to the whole executive. In practice, referral is often a matter of political discretion.
In June, the Appeal Court ruled that approval for the Larne gas caverns project should have been referred to the whole executive.
Alliance environment minister Andrew Muir was so concerned this set a precedent for mandatory referral that he took the case to the Supreme Court, but it has refused leave to appeal.
Forcing every minister to put their fingerprints on every contentious decision means nothing difficult at Stormont may ever get done again.
Of course, it will take some time to notice the difference.
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The Department of Justice has no policy on transgender prisoners, the High Court has discovered, obliging the judge to devise one on the spot.
The case was brought by a transgender woman who was being held in Maghaberry on allegations of threatening to kill. The court moved her briefly to the women’s prison at Hydebank Wood, from where she was released on bail.
Alliance has been in charge of the department since justice was devolved in 2010.
There was little interest in transgender issues until a decade ago and Stormont has collapsed for five of the past eight years.
Even so, it seems extraordinary for a party as vocal on gender politics as Alliance to have instituted no policy on prisoners, especially after the 2023 scandal on this issue that convulsed politics in Scotland.
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DUP MLA Michelle McIlveen appears to be tasked with submitting her party’s ‘gotcha’ written assembly questions.
In her latest fishing exhibition, McIlveen asked Sinn Féin finance minister Caoimhe Archibald about “performance bonuses to public servants”.
Archibald replied that the Department of Finance pays only civil servants, “not the public sector as a whole”.
The civil service has only one bonus scheme, for industrial road workers at the Department for Infrastructure, offering up to £2,700 a year “directly related to an individual’s output based on time and motion studies of specific work activities”.
That might appear to have batted McIlveen’s question away, but it raises a question neither woman may have intended: should civil servants and the public sector as a whole not have more bonus schemes based on time and motion studies?
It looks like white-collar privilege to have this confined to people fixing the roads.
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Police responding to complaints of scramblers being driven on the road - including the wrong side of the road - in west Belfast on Christmas morning were surrounded by an angry crowd and assaulted. Two officers were injured and a police car was damaged in the incident.
It seems memories are short on the dangers of these machines. Even in legal use, they have a horrific injury and fatality record in Northern Ireland, with young children regularly among the victims and the last death occurring just five months ago.
The PSNI prioritises seizing illegal scramblers for good reason.
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The DUP has criticised Michelle O’Neill for attending a memorial event to three IRA members killed by their own bomb.
However, the unionist party appears to be pulling its punches. Following her attendance at a Remembrance Day service in Belfast last month, it was inevitable the first minister would have to balance the scales, as republicans see it.
If the DUP really wanted to cause trouble it would be raising potential breaches of the ministerial code, for which the assembly can censure a minister, cut their pay or exclude them from office for up to 12 months.
Ministers are sworn “to support the rule of law unequivocally in word and deed” and “to challenge all paramilitary activity”.
Sinn Féin’s stock reply, repeated once again in this instance, is that “everyone has the right to remember their dead”.
While that is true in the trite sense of recalling a memory, there is no specific right to acts of remembrance, all of which are subject to terrorism legislation.
Any assembly motion on this would mainly be a nightmare for Alliance, which could find itself with the casting vote. Some in the DUP would consider that an added attraction.
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Farmers held a protest outside an Asda supermarket and depot in Larne, complaining the chain replaced some Northern Ireland-grown potatoes with cheaper products from Britain in its discounted Christmas range.
DUP MP Sammy Wilson turned up to show solidarity - a bewildering contradiction after years of insisting UK supermarkets must be free to bring anything in from Britain, especially to keep down prices.
While it might seem inevitable that politicians must pander to local farmers, the lobby’s influence is out of all proportion to its size, at least in terms of votes.
Farmers are not only vastly outnumbered by shoppers in Wilson’s constituency; they may even be outnumbered by Asda employees.
There are 5,500 full-time farms in Northern Ireland and 4,500 Asda staff.