Time To Go?

It must be a sweaty time for civil servants pushing paper in the NIO and for the squaddies wiling away the hours playing Texas hold 'em in safety of their barracks, for radical changes may be on the cards.

Sinn Féin's John O’Dowd today has made the first move by suggesting the scrapping of the NIO and cutting back on MOD spending, could release up to £1.7 billion for use by the local Executive in their future plans.

His comments come the day after Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness gave a loose indication of their plans for government in which the First Minister said that there would have to be hard choices made in the future as the comprehensive spending
review would mean that money would be tight.

What better way to finance the Executive's future plans than to shed dead wood, as John O'Dowd sees it. In fact Mr O'Dowd suggests that not only do the NIO contribute nothing, but they are actually keeping the work of the Assembly back.

“The reality is that much of the opposition to political progress has been directed by the spooks and spies operating from within the NIO. These are clearly people with a vested interest in blocking political progress because they recognise that as we move forward that their jobs will become superfluous."

I suppose the NIO's many non-spooks and spies will stand a good chance of picking up the new jobs within the Assembly and John O'Dowd will get to rub shoulders with them. As for the soldiers, well their paymasters in London have been busy over the course of recent years to ensure that there is plenty of work for them in sunnier climates.