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.

A few successes at the US:NI investment conference yesterday, despite the worrying economic outlook in the United States.

US company CyberSource have announced they will be creating 20 new jobs (rising to 60 in three years) in a new research centre to be based in Northern Ireland. Belfast-based financial services company Wombat, recently purchased by the New York Stock Exchange, will also be creating 77 new jobs. Bombardier Aerospace are investing £70m to underpin 1000 jobs at Belfast engineering firm Shorts, mostly to work on parts of the new CRJ1000 lower-emissions short-haul aircraft (although £10m of that is coming from from Invest NI).

The numbers may be small but I'd hazard a guess that, long-term, 100-150 well paid graduate jobs will prove much more significant than employing 800 battery hens in the north-west (although I suppose anything is better than the Derry Disability Living Allowance).

So, are Invest NI setting their sights too low by opening an office in Mumbai to attract more Indian firms to create call centre jobs here? Or are they just aiming for what's achievable?

Elections to the 11 new councils won't take place until 2011.

NIO minister Shaun Woodward has announced that the local government elections due to take place in Northern Ireland in 2009 have been put back to 2011 at the request of executive ministers.

Effectively the councillors who were elected for 4 year terms in 2005 are getting the length of their contracts extended by 50%. The official reason is something to do with the local government reform that will see the reshaping of the council boundaries and the reduction in the number of councils from 26 to 11.

What I want to know is which executive ministers, and why? I have my suspicions about certain currently dominant parties being worried about losing vote share with voters quickly realising that this wonderful new dispensation has delivered precisely the square root of fuck all, but of course they are only suspicions.

It comes as no surprise to this blogger that our illustrious education minister, one Caitriona Ruane, has once again come under fire this week. Grammar schools have struck another blow against her policy of abolishing academic selection and this morning I hear that primary school headmasters have joined in the criticism and accused the under-fire education minister of reneging on a promise to level out the funding gap between primary and secondary schools.

I was pleased to see that my former school was among the 32 post-primary schools (out of the 229 in the country) that have so far committed to continuing with academic selection via an entrance exam. Lumen Christi has already indicated it will set its own entrance exam and yesterday the Association for Quality Education announced that 31 state grammar schools would be organising a common entrance exam once the Department of Education ends the 11+ test. Incidentally, despite Caitriona Ruane's depiction of the schools as "a minority of a minority", all 4 of the grammar schools I considered attending at age 10 are among the "rebel" schools planning on using the test, which could be bought in from England.

Ruane had a chance to replace the 11+ with a fairer system of testing, perhaps by having more tests spread throughout the year to reduce the pressure from the current big two exams, but without the supervision of the Department of Education there can be no guarantees that the new admissions test will be any fairer or less stressful than the current one (though I must be honest and state that as a 10 year old I could never see what all the fuss was about). In fact, given that the pupils will have to travel to a local assessment centre to take the tests, and parents may have to pay up to £65 to have their children sit it, for all her dogmatic ranting, all supposed socialist Ms Ruane has succeeded in doing is privatising the transfer procedure and increasing the pressure on chldren leaving primary school. Good work.

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Everyone's favourite unelected legislator has had an idea.

I can't drive. I've just never bothered to learn. So lets say I get my licence next month and I drive to my girlfriend's parents in south Down. Alastair Ross will be very upset if I leave for Belfast much after 8pm. Who is he to have an opinion on what time I drive home at? What right does the state have to extend the fairly reasonable restrictions on driving to such an extent? He also wants to ban me from driving my girlfriends sister anywhere for the first year. Total ban on alcohol, perhaps, but the reason zero tolerance on this doesn't work, is that small amounts of blood alcohol are (as far as I remember) naturally occurring!

Lisburn man/Larne MLA Alastair Ross really has let it go to his head. If he wants a nanny state, he should go to Scandinavia. When I learn to drive, I can't exceed 45mph for one year. Personally, I think that a year is a bit long, but the principle is fair enough. To extend that any further is frankly absurd. I know why he has suggested this, but using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is no was to frame policy.

Maybe a better idea would be to introduce measures to curb the enthusiasm of unelected 20-something-year-old MLAs. The evidence that it's needed is certainly there.

I was recently required to do an analysis of an academic research paper. A colleague I was working with chose this one, which I hadn't read before. There are some fascinating things in the responses.

Page 6 of the PDF shows the huge swing in support for the agreement before finally resting where it started. I'm a bit dubious about the unexplained sharp rises towards the end of the campaign, but maybe I'm just forgetting something. Page 8 highlights the fact that the republic had a vote one third larger than in the north, but 10 times more spoilt ballots.

On page 11 we get into the really interesting stuff. Only half of Protestant no voters objected to power sharing. Two thirds of them supported the establishment of an assembly. 86% of catholic nationalists supported NI remaining in the UK, and half supported the removal of articles 2 & 3. Over 80 percent of all protestants felt that the IRA should complete its surrender BEFORE SF were allowed in Government.

Page 13 shows that Trimble had at least 50% approval ratings across the board. 50% of no voters trusted him, compared to 27% of yes voters approval for Paisley. Paisley and Adams had the square root of no cross community support.

History has without doubt shown that Trimble was right in the broad picture. But I wouldn't be surprised of even the man himself now recognises that his timing was very slightly, but critically, wrong.

But we all got there in the end.

OK, so Peter Robinson is going to be confirmed as the new leader of the DUP on Thursday after being selected by the party's MLAs yesterday. Nothing unexpected there. I've been waiting for the day when Paisley would finally step down and I suppose what happens next should, in theory, be interesting. So why am I so bored by it?

Peter Robinson impressed me (a little) at Finance and I've always thought he came across as much more pragmatic and sensible than his former sensei. He has a reputation as a good strategist, and it's his brains that many credit with the DUP's surpassing of the Ulster Unionists as the most popular party among unionist voters (that and keeping Paisley out of the way anyway).

He's also spoken a lot about cutting down on waste and absenteeism and sickness in the civil service (demanding efficiency savings across the board at the latest budget IIRC) and boosting the private sector. As a small c conservative, this all sounds great to me, although it seems to have been painfully slow progress. Which I think is where the boredom comes from. Nothing is likely to change any time soon.

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This story was on 5 Live yesterday evening. According to the media, Poole Borough Council used "laws to track criminals and terrorists" (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to determine whether they were lying about living in a school catchment area.

So what powers were these? Phone tapping? CCTV cameras pointed at the house 24/7? SWAT teams on standby?

No. They sent a man to check if the family left the house they claimed they lived at each morning and returned there in the afternoon. The BBC did their best to sensationalise this as "spying" - despite listeners texting in telling them to stop trying to 'sex up' their stories. Others went one better, using attention grabbing headlines claiming that 'spies stalked' the family. If this is spying, the government have been 'spying' on suspected benefit cheats for years now. Why is this any different?

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You'd scarcely credit it but Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey is fuming with Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde and is demanding an apology after the chief of police allegedly claimed the policing board had "gone a bit tribal".

Supposedly Orde accused the elected members of being more interested in political debate than policing issues. Frankly, I suspect describing the debate as "political" was being generous.

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