A month after the dual carriageway of the A5 was apparently given the final go-ahead, the Department for Infrastructure has been given notice of another intended legal notice.

Sinn Féin minister John O’Dowd said he was “extremely disappointed” but he can hardly be surprised. This is increasingly the fate of any attempt to build anything, anywhere.

In February, the UK government commissioned an expert review into the problem of endless legal challenges to major infrastructure projects. Known as the Banner Review, it made 10 recommendations which are currently out for public consultation.

Most are highly technical and not all would translate to Northern Ireland’s separate and much smaller legal system, but the general thrust involves reducing opportunities and timeframes for judicial review, streamlining planning and court procedures, and developing more expertise among judges.

Of course we need our own review here. It can take years but the alternative routinely takes decades.

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Thanks to last month’s Westminster Budget, Sinn Féin Finance Minister Caoimhe Archibald had an extraordinary £700m to hand out in the latest round of monitoring, the chief’s thrice-yearly redistribution of unspent funds.

She gave half to the Department of Health, but UUP Health Minister Mike Nesbitt still refused to approve the round because it did not meet all his “cost pressures”, which are mainly due to agreed pay rises. The UUP also refused to approve the previous round and the budget proposal.

Other departments face similar pressures and received a much less generous allocation. Their ministers take a collective responsibility, not opposing their own administration.

The mandatory coalition once provided a weak excuse for parties to pretend to be in government and opposition at the same time. That excuse was removed by the 2020 New Decade, New Approach deal, which allowed smaller parties to enter official opposition up to two years after an executive was formed. UUP has that option until February 2026.

( UUP opposition to budget could signal next Stormont crisis – Newton EmersonOpens in new window )

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The British Medical Association (BMA) in Northern Ireland has warned that many GP practices will cut services and some will close because of the employer national insurance increase in Westminster’s budget.

The increase adds around £900 to the cost of employing one person. Although most public bodies are reimbursed, most GP practices are private businesses and will be responsible for the full cost.

However, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has only restored the tax to the level it was in 2022 and 2023, when most exercises would have been on the same contract with roughly the same income and expenditure.

The practice faces genuine financial challenges, exacerbated by unique Stormont failures on issues such as insurance. But it must be remembered that the BMA is only a middle-class trade union. Not every ailment it complains of is necessarily an emergency.

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Northern Ireland’s co-ordination system for Stormont and councils removes democratic elections and reduces transparency, an Electoral Commission report has said.

It suggests a “replacement list” as a possible solution, where candidates nominate replacements for themselves when running. This is used for some seats in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies and was used for all seats at Stormont until 2009.

It is in principle more democratic, as voters approve the list of replacements, but in practice it is simply “pre-cooption”.

Independent MPs can still provide a replacement list, although they don’t have to do so until after they are elected, showing that it is more about practicality than principle.

Some form of adoption is inevitable in multi-member constituencies, as the largest local party would otherwise win every by-election. The only truly democratic option would be to create 90 single-mandate constituencies, most of which would be safe seats given our shared geography.

This would entrench much worse problems than the non-problem of co-option.

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There has been a lively debate in Dublin for a decade about relocating urban golf courses for housing.

Four years ago, Dublin-based Merrion Property Group offered to relocate Belfast’s Balmoral Golf Club so they could buy the 75-acre site. To demonstrate its seriousness, Merrion bought a 150-hectare farm a few kilometers away in Drumbo and brought in a former Ryder Cup captain to design a replacement championship course.

Balmoral’s members turned down the offer but now they may have to sell all or part of their course for housing anyway, as their the club is in financial difficulties. Meanwhile, Merrion has put the Drumbo property back on the market.

Members of other Belfast private golf clubs will no doubt regard this as a cautionary tale. They are not immune to the social and economic changes it represents.

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Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald has said it is unreasonable to ask most of her party’s representatives about the problemsmainly because of their age.

Interviewed on Joe Brolly’s podcast, she said: “The Liberal establishment has a difficulty, or reluctance, or refusal at key times, to move forward and to actually accept that you don’t ask someone who was a baby in the 1970s about things that happened in the 1970s It is not a reasonable proposition, it would not reasonably be made with anyone from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or the Labor Party.

This might be fair enough, if it wasn’t yet another example of Sinn Féin’s ever-changing statute of limitations from the past.

DUP leader Gavin Robinson was born in 1984. Should he never be asked about anything dodgy his party may have been involved in right up to the Anglo-Irish agreement? That seems unlikely to be the view of the Republican establishment.

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The latest figures from England show another big rise in the number of ‘neets’ – young people not in education, employment or training.

The 18.6 percent total is the highest since 2014, when youth unemployment had recovered from the financial crash. Nor is this part of a general trend: inactivity levels are falling among the rest of the working-age population.

( Newton Emerson: Is forced education really the best way to reach the ‘neets’?Opens in new window )

This has implications for DUP minister Paul Givan’s recently announced plan to make education compulsory up to the age of 18. Since England introduced this policy in 2015, the net amount it was meant to reduce has steadily moved in the opposite direction.

That doesn’t mean politics is causing the problem; the problem may well have been worse without it. But it’s clearly not the silver bullet that most of its advocates seem to think.