Page 2 - Gail Walker News Today

This week I joined the ranks of the many citizens of Belfast and beyond who have been ‘parked in’ at their home and discovered over the course of an extraordinary four hours that there is literally nothing you can do about it — even if you really do need to get out as soon as possible.

Amid the euphoria and novelty of the last week at Stormont – coronations, partnerships, allocations of offices, distribution of limousines, keys to the Executive washroom – I have to confess to being a little disappointed.

Ten long months ago this column said that if Sir Jeffrey Donaldson got the Windsor Framework through the DUP party machine he could become one of the great historic unionist leaders. This week he took a major step towards that accolade. Now he just has to finish making some significant changes to his party’s mindset.

The first response we might be expected to have to the extraordinary interview given by Pedro Donald, owner of the Sunflower Bar, on his decision to leave Northern Ireland for a new life in Amsterdam is to try and talk him down.

A candidate for town council dropped out of the race last week amid a hearing challenging whether she met the residency requirements.

1 Let’s start with one wish that definitely will come true — happily 2024 will bring the much anticipated second season of the brilliant BBC crime drama Blue Lights, about rookie PSNI officers on the beat in Belfast.

What is it with Christmas this year? Where is the magic and sparkle and anticipation? Instead many seem braced as it hurtles towards them, like a hollow husk of a thing, emptied out of all its promise and joy and hope.

No matter what new and innovative technology arrives, it seems Northern Ireland still applies the oldest practices in the book — wipe it, lose it, dump it, wreck it. Stormont ministers and senior civil servants during the Covid crisis have since had their government-issued electronic devices wiped, thus erasing all official information amassed in discussions via WhatsApp — a scandal exposed when the UK Covid Inquiry wanted to examine the data.

In the unfortunate event of you being murdered, it is likely that your face will be more recognisable to the general public than anybody convicted of killing you. That’s not how it is in other places, but it’s how it works in Northern Ireland.

The little item this week about how the congregation of Darkley Gospel Hall had raised a collection to help the Grimley family in south Armagh shone a light on the huge capacity among our people to reach out and across even when we are at our most damaged and our most hurt.