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?

I watched a quiz on TV recently where there was a multiple choice question (roughly) as follows: In what country is the stock exchange known as the BSE?
A. India B. Japan C. Thailand

I knew Japan has the Nikkei and I knew Bombay had been changed to Mumbai. I also "knew" this was because the British colonists had misinterpreted the natives saying "Mumbai" as Bombay* (sounds plausible if you imagine Mumbai in an Indian accent). Not able to think of any other Indian cities beginning with B, I concluded it must be in Bangkok, Thailand.

Apparently not. India's main stock exchange is still the Bombay Stock Exchange.

"So what?" I hear you cry. I'll not pretend this has a major impact on Northern Ireland, though I there may be a few parallels with our own Stroke City. Apparently the Bombay Stock Exhchange, Bombay Times, Bombay High Court and Bombay Scottish School are now being targeted by vandals who enjoy the support of a nationalist political grouping (the "Army of Shiva") who have been accused of orchestrating violence against Muslims. 12 years ago they succeeded in having Bombay redesignated Mumbai. What was Madras is now Chenai, Calcutta is Kolkata and there are calls for Goa to be renamed Govapuri.

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?

The Sewel Convention states that if Westminster is to legislate for Scotland, it must seek the permission of the Scottish parliament first. It is somewhat different, in that the Assembly couldn't have made this decision at present but the Government has decided to legislate for Northern Ireland against the expressed wish of a majority of the Assembly.

I wont comment on the substance of the legislation in question, but if they're willing to pull a 'nanny knows best' stunt with the age of consent, no one should be under the illusion they wouldn't do it with an aberration of normality posing as a bill of rights.

If the Sewel Convention ever applied to Northern Ireland, the Government has just sought to let us know that it doesn't anymore. This throws out the window any promises the DUP made on the Irish Language Act, the protection of academic selection, anything. Mark Devenport suggests that this is nothing more sinister than a throwback to the Hain days. I wish I were so sure.

UPDATE: Seems I was wrong. Page 8 and 9 here say "This convention was adopted from the previous experience of devolution in Northern Ireland and the convention applied to the new Northern Ireland Assembly." Page 5 here states "These arrangements – Sewell, JMC – apply equally in Northern Ireland and Wales." haven't been able to find anything on the DCA website though.

There seems to have been an awful lot of downtime here at EU lately (including most of today!). I am monitoring this and will move hosts if I have to to combat this should it recur. My hosts assure me, for the 3rd or 4th time, that they've found the source of the problem and corrected it (this time it was too much server load). Hopefully normal service will now have resumed, but I'll keep an eye on it. In the mean time I'm sorry for the hassle.

Update: I've moved the site to a new host. If you're reading this your ISP's DNS records have already updated, i.e. your ISP knows the site has moved (unfortunately as of an hour ago my own hadn't). The rest of the interwebs should catch up over the next 48 hours or so and normal service will then resume.

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.