Seems it's not just the Stormont crew that like to get their snouts in the trough. Welsh Assembly Members are making good use of their £12.5k expenses allowances, with the Lib Dems leading the pack when it comes to spending public money (qu'elle surprise!) on kitting out their Cardiff pads.

1. Lib Dems AMs (6): Total claimed: £55,321. Average claim: £9,220
2. Plaid Cymru AMs (15): Total claim: £129,936. Average claim: £8,662
3. Conservative AMs (12): Total claimed: £93,730. Average claimed: £7,810
4. Labour AMs (26): Total claimed: £121,977. Average claim: £4,691

Having said that, the £12.5k looks paltry compared to the And that's only one of the expenses they're entitled to. They also have office expenses comparable to the £70,000 that Northern Ireland's MLAs can claim.

On a slight aside, our most expensive (d'ya see what I did there?!) MLA was Sean Farren with total allowances (for 2006-7) of £83,869.07.

Now about that devolution cost/benefit analysis...

Over the past few months it's become clear that the DUP won’t take Gerry Kelly and Sinn Fein won't take Jeffrey Donaldson as Justice Minister. This has led to the crazy notion that the Alliance should do it, and utterly predictably they seem amenable to the idea. So much for their principled stand against the "sectarian consensus" (sic)

Liam Clarke in his column on Sunday suggested that this was the "missing piece of the jigsaw" and that the Alliance are the potential answer to a tricky question for the chuckle coalition.

Alliance is a creature so useful that if it didn't exist it would have to be invented. In some ways the party, which is linked to the Progressive Democrats in the republic and the Liberal Democrats in Britain, acts as Northern Ireland's conscience - a coalition of reasonable, middle-of-the-road folk united around an agenda which is liberal, pragmatic and non-sectarian.

It is just me suspects he write this specifically to get name checked on Alliance election literature next time out? This sort of gushing praise doesn't really add anything to the argument. After all, he is simply dressing up a party that stands for nothing more than "we're not them and, we're awfully nice". That isn't an ideology or an agenda; its political activism built on nothing more than middle class snobbery and intellectual cop-out.

Alliance have spent their time in local government, not as Clarke states ensuring power sharing, but selling their pretence of principles for office. I suppose it's only surprising it took them this long to sell themselves for ministerial office. They call themselves an opposition, yet we are now apparently seriously considering taking an executive with 97 of the 108 Assembly members represented, and making that 104. We need LESS of the legislature tied up in the programme for government, not more! The power sharing arrangements were designed to be short to medium term, SF and the DUP spent a little too long trying to fight their way out of their Belfast Agreement boxes, but now that they've accepted them the timer is going again. Progress towards normailising the governmental arrangements here will only be hindered by putting the Alliance into Justice just for the sake of spiting the UUP and SDLP. Look at the figure again, 104 out of 108 MLAs. And when one adds the rest of the Alliance's quasi technical group, it leaves only Dawn Purvis outside the Executive loop.

If the Alliance want ministerial office so badly, give it to them. But if it happens, my Party and the SDLP shouldn't be there. We would have moved from an involuntary coalition, to a voluntary one with Alliance's admittance to the Executive, which is a fundamental change to the situation. Critically for the UUP and SDLP though, the situation with a five party Executive would be utterly untenable, a bizarre elective dictatorship where the wranglings over legislation would take place behind closed doors in the Executive, with the Assembly as a rubber stamping body. Sound famaliar? It should.

It's something politicians, particularly in Northern Ireland, seem to be especially adept at. OK its their job, but some outlays seem to be more worthwhile than others.

A few figures appeared yesterday:

• Policing George Bush's one-day visit: £300k
• 1 prosecution out of 1,100 cold-cases re-opened: £34m
• Bloody Sunday enquiry: £188m (to date)
• Enquiries in the next year: £100m (estimate)
• Subsidy to Citi to create 145 jobs: £2m (£13,793 per job)
• Cuts to ambulance services to save £1.5m: priceless!

Ah well, at least Larne's council aren't paying for red, white an blue bunting.

Will Crawley reckons Iris Robinson missed a meeting of the Health Committee at Stormont (which she chairs), because she was at a Castlereagh Borough Council meeting instead. You do despair sometimes.

Sinn Fein have spent the last few days stirring up the idea that they will refuse to nominate McGuinness to serve with Peter Robinson. They may refuse to do so, citing their difficulties with the Irish Language Act and, rather disingenuously, Ruane's problems with academic selection.

If the latter point was really an issue for them, they wouldn't moan about it, they'd take the opportunity to shuffle her out of the Executive. Maybe the Irish Language Act is the problem

But if they do push this to an election in September, they would reset the electoral clock. They may push the SDLP out of the executive if they're lucky, but they would certainly keep well ahead of them but they would defiantly push the next election from March 2011 to September 2012. Is there any particular reason they would want to do that? Who knows.

I'm preparing to go on a two week holiday and as I was out buying sun cream and collecting some Euros I noticed an odd headline on the chest of one of those guys selling the Tele at busy junctions. According to the ever-reliable Belfast Telegraph and an anonymous source, Sinn Fein are contemplating refusing to nominate a Deputy First Minister because they are frustrated at the lack of progress over what they see as key issues (mainly the devolution of Policing and Justice I'd imagine).

Leaving aside the fact that Sinn Fein knew fine well that there were no guarantees on that target date (as has been pointed out over and over on Slugger O'Toole) what exactly have they got to gain by refusing to nominate? The DUP won't be able to elect their new leader Peter Robinson as First Minister, which, I gather, means no executive, which, again correct me if I'm wrong, means no Assembly. They expect the DUP to back down and hand over a few concessions to keep the Assembly alive?

Ballocks. If Sinn Fein want to bring about an end to the Assembly then let them, it will be no great loss as far as I'm concerned. It will also be a PR disaster for the provisional republican movement, with the world able to see clear as day whose fault it was that our beloved institutions collapsed.

No, they're far too canny for that. This is either a couple of Sinners shit-stirring in the shadows, tabloid journalism at its worst or a bit of both.

Have a read of Chekov's piece on the Bel Tel/MORI poll last week. The data set is fascinating. The voting intention figures are bunkem as usual (DUP 20%, UUP 14%, SDLP 13% SF 11% APNI 7%), but it's interesting that Reg, Michael and Margaret Ritchie are once again significently more popular than some of their DUP and SF colleagues, and once again come out in the top half.

Another one for the "What the hell is she thinking?" scrapbook. Everyone's favourite tennis star Caitriona Ruane has finally put forward her proposals for ending academic selection... by not quite ending it? Well not quite, not yet. Maybe.

It seems as if she's done exactly what Basil McCrea predicted she would, i.e. "cobble together a last-minute proposal", when she realised she wasn't going to get her way by shouting louder than her opponents, stamping her feet and quickly burying her head in the sand.

A new type of transfer test will be put together to run over three years from 2008-2001. The test will cover a broader range of topics than the current one and grammar schools may only be allowed to select between 20% and 50% of their pupils.

Nothing has changed. She still hasn't got the power to ban academic selection, and there is no way in hell this half-assed, mish-mash "policy" (using the term in the loosest possible sense) will prevent those grammar schools committed to maintaining their high standards from implementing their own test, rendering the whole exercise a pointless and expensive waste. But who cares about the cost of egalitarian dogma when it's not your cash?

It's been a busy few weeks for those following the debate over the national stadium plans for the Maze.

A matter of a couple of weeks before Peter Robinson is due to make his 'recommendation' to the Executive over the Maze plans, it has emerged John Sweeney, the Permanent Secretary of DCAL ( the deparment headed by Edwin Poots, the Maze's head cheerleader - nothing to do with the fact that the Maze is practically in his back garden of course), has refused to endorse DCAL's assessment of the plans. A senior civil servant is quoted as saying the Maze proposal "doesn't stack up" and that adding the extra 8,500 seats to the original 30,000 doubled the expected costs.

This comes only a couple of weeks after a report identified no less than 5 potential sites for a stadium in Belfast that it says are "better suited" to hosting a large sports stadium.

Those potential sites are Maysfield Leisure Centre, Ormeau Park and the North Foreshore (nothing new there) as well as relative newcomer Danny Blanchflower and, out of nowhere, Boucher Road playing fields.

The week before that, the Amalgamation of Northern Ireland Supporters Clubs released a highly critical response to the PwC business case for the Maze, which was finally released at the start of this year after what seemed like years of waiting.

They're coming from all sides today.

O'Neill's ever-watchful eye has picked up that Wales's GVA per head is only 77% of the UK average, (down from 79% when the Assembly was set up in 1999 and 84% back in 1991) despite receiving more than £1bn of EU aid to boost economic activity, placing them firmly at the bottom of the UK league table. Never mind, as long as the Bank of England, the Olympic Delivery Authority and the Carbon Trust have to "deliver services" in Welsh, what does wealth matter?

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland where the GVA is 81% of the UK average (that figure is unchanged since 1997 and currently sees us tying with north-east England for second-last spot), devolution seems to be having similar levels of success. According to a MORI poll conducted last month (spotted by Chekov in a report in the Belfast Telegraph):

• 21% of people polled think the Executive has done a good job in the last year since it was reinstated while 28% rated their collective performance as poor.
• 72% of people asked thought devolution had failed to make any difference on their lives.
• 46% thought devolution had had no impact on Ulster's economy and 10% thought it had made it worse.
• The Health Service fared even worse: 67% thought devolution had had no impact, while 16% thought devolution had improved it and another 16% thought it had made it worse.

The BBC's Mark Devenport claims the "most obvious achievement of the current executive is that it is still in existence" and our own First Minister yesterday extolled the current setup as "not perfect and not wholly democratic, but the best [he] could get for the people of Northern Ireland" - not exactly glowing recommendations, are they?

Perhaps now would be a good time to reflect on the bill for devolution.