The squealing and yelling began last week as soon as the first details of the Review of Public Administration leaked out and you can be certain the squealing will continue for a long time yet. Never mind all the people working in education and library boards and health trusts and eeny-weeny councils who will be affected. The loudest noises are coming from local politicians who have had their snouts in the trough for decades.
Councillors make up 40% of education and library board membership and a hefty percentage of all the other quango membership that wastes hundreds of millions of pounds. How do they get there? Answer: they elect themselves or the party nominates them.
Some of them sit on so many boards, committees and advisory bodies that they can't attend them all so they make a bee-line for the ones with attendance allowances and travelling expenses.
There are dozens of councillors who have made a reasonable living for years out of arriving late for meetings and leaving early so they can rush off to the next paying meeting and pick up another attendance allowance.
Unionists are the worst at this scam especially in councils which they control and exclude nationalists from all outside bodies, though there are a fair number of nationalists at it too where they are cock of the walk.
So now there'll be fewer councils – seven let's hope – but more importantly, fewer councillors and fewer quangos for them to polish their trouser seats on.
Is there any chance that the NIO will abolish the dual and triple mandate of the survivors so that we don't have MPs who are also MLA and councillors?
It cost the Irish government a fortune to buy out the double jobbers. Will the NIO take the opportunity and wipe them out here before the next local government elections in 2009?
As it is, only Sinn Féin has acted to stop its members holding two or more public offices.
Other parties have councillors who rush from council meetings up to Stormont to collect travelling expenses before they rush back to the council to collect more expenses and allowances and even a few who travel on to Westminster for more. Scandalous.
Wait till you hear all the whinging about the need for 15 councils because of local accountability. What percentage of people could name their local councillor, five% maybe?
What percentage could name any councillor?
You don't suppose the political parties who want more than seven councils and that's all of them except Sinn Féin, want 15 because they'd all have to be represented on the new unitary education and health boards?
Listen for all the hypocrisy about 'balkanisation' coming from the DUP who have been doing all in their power to balkanise any district they control even though they don't even know that's the word for it. Aren't Lisburn, Ballymena, Ballymoney and Castlereagh wonderful examples to hold up to the world? Certainly enough to give Mostar and Sarajevo lessons in civic administration.
In this respect as in all the others it's down to the NIO to introduce legally binding measures to require partnership so that neither community is ostracised, something the British administration here has disgracefully permitted for the generation it has been operating direct rule. Balkanisation, what nonsense – as if the present arrangement is a paragon of diversity. The fact is that any arrangement in the polarised society here, seven, 11 or 15 councils will produce minority enclaves. The only way to give them a fair crack of the whip is to build in legal requirements and that's long overdue. Don't get your hopes up though. The £200 million plus saving that the NIO predicts will only happen if there's massive redundancies at the top of each board, trust and council. It's a safe bet that won't happen. Just watch the same number of senior people who built quintuplicated empires in five education boards and 26councils miraculously surviving to cluster together claiming they need monster salaries to administer one huge education board and seven large councils. Just watch the NIO bottling out of seven councils in the forlorn belief they might cajole the DUP into a new assembly.
