More DUP fault-lines develop

Prioritising paid work has meant slow blogging over the past couple of days.  A more lengthy assessment of the CSR's effects on Northern Ireland is in the offing.

But in the mean time it's interesting to note that the Finance Minister formerly known as 'Red Sammy' Wilson  has throughout the run-up to cuts struck a more realistic figure than his DUP colleagues, whom Belfast Telegraph Political editor, David Gordon, notes are becoming increasingly Keynesian (and it takes one to know one).

Meanwhile the party's former leader, the Reverend Lord Doctor Ian Bannside Paisley, has taken what appears to be a dig at his successor's new found love of integrated education.  In a thoroughly baffling News Letter column he includes this gnomic offering:

The lively debate concerning education which this week has exercised many is a debate that we cannot luxuriate in or afford commissions on, while there presently is not the funding for classroom assistants, for library books, for support teachers, nor indeed before the whole issue of the 11-plus is even sorted. 

It would seem that at the start of this dig there needs to be a  few areas roped off and a decent site-map laid out before us, rather than everyone running about with their own shovel and creating a quagmire rather than a tunnel. Sometimes I just don't dig it!

We await a development of Peter Robinson's ideas on education, but if they really do comprise a genuine integration or secularisation of schools, rather than a take-over of the Catholic sector, this is a timely reminder that he could run into strong opposition within his own party.