Yesterday (Wednesday) our local parties went to London to beg Gordon Brown for £5 billion over five years.
Was this figure worked out with the detail deserved by such an enormous sum? It seems like a rather round number.
It also seems remarkably naive. For every penny Gordon giveth, Gordon taketh at least one penny away.
Northern Ireland's politicians have no excuse for not knowing exactly how Gordonomics really works.
In 1998, immediately after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the chancellor popped up in Belfast with a promised £315 million 'peace dividend' that turned out to mean selling the Port of Belfast to pay for widening the Westlink.
The very first act of the new assembly was to block this proposal, and for that one shining example of good sense the assembly has never been forgiven.
At every critical point in the process since, Gordon Brown has once again hinted at a peace dividend which once again turns out to require asset-stripping the Belfast harbour estate.
Throughout this period the NIO has failed to hand over independent powers for the harbour commissioners voted through by the last assembly. Meanwhile the Strategic Investment Board, set up to "deliver value-for-money infrastructure" by delivering public property to the private sector on a plate, continues to drool over that £10 billion of land beside the lough.
Managing the Belfast harbour estate in the public interest is essential to the development of Northern Ireland. But Gordon Brown would swap it all for a sectarian shopping list just to play the prudent peace-maker.
This tight-fistedness would be fair enough if it was based on actual prudence, but unfortunately the opposite is the case. No British chancellor in history has presided over such a staggering increase in public spending, public borrowing and personal taxation.
The reason Gordon Brown can't spare any more money for Ulster-Scots murals and Irish-language street signs is that Britain is broke.
Northern Ireland's politicians have no excuse for not understanding this either. Local private finance initiative disasters have already committed us to 20 years of paying for schools we no longer need and an identical fiasco is now looming over the construction and maintenance of government office buildings.
The entire New Labour project has been funded through similar projects, purely because this type of borrowing doesn't show up in the national debt.
Short-term profits have already been spent on unsustainable levels of public sector employment and even if all such 'strategic investment' stopped tomorrow, the ongoing costs will constrain government spending for decades.
How Peter Hain observed these failings in the Northern Ireland economy without noticing their existence across the whole country is a mystery that will echo down the ages.
However, there is no mystery over why Gordon Brown suddenly needs to slam on the brakes.
In September the Office of National Statistics finally started changing its accounting rules to include PFI borrowing in the national debt. This immediately pushed the Treasury over its spending growth targets – although only 10 per cent of current contracts were included.
Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers says this initial rule change alone means that Gordon Brown has to slash his budget in 2007. So there goes that first £1 billion a year – unless we sell off a similar amount of the family silver.
Perhaps this also explains Monday's carefully-choreographed panic over global warming.
If Gordon Brown really wanted to reduce aircraft emissions he would tax aviation fuel. But that would encourage airlines to be more fuel-efficient, thereby paying less tax, which isn't what Gordon Brown wants at all.
In fact as recently as last February Britain vetoed EU proposals for a European aviation fuel tax and Gordon Brown personally intervened against a similar debate by the World Bank.
Instead, the British government plans to increase airline ticket duty. This won't stop people flying and it won't offer airlines any incentive to burn less fuel. However, it will certainly help with Whitehall's financial ozone hole.
Perhaps the chancellor really is determined to save the world, just as he was previously determined to save Africa. Still, the means of our salvation looks suspiciously like just another tax.
Gordon Brown is the Robert Maxwell of the British economy – a delusional control freak just barely keeping his empire afloat with deception, dodgy borrowing and regular raids on the pension fund.
One day he will fall off the back of his yacht. But all the parish pump politicians in Northern Ireland put together won't push him one moment sooner.
