PATIENCE. It’s a virtue, or so we’re told. If you live in Northern Ireland patience is not just a virtue, but key to existence and holding onto a semblance of sanity.
Last week we learned that the wait to see a hospital consultant is growing lengthier day-by-day across NI’s health and social care system. If you are ill, please be patient.
Motorists on the Westlink and on the A6 road need patience on the daily commute. Improvements may or may not come, but as you slowly inch forward, please be patient.
If you are a restaurant owner, hotel proprietor or venue landlord you may look enviously at the flood of passengers flowing out from Dublin Airport across the south. There is pressure on Tourism Ireland to put more emphasis on NI, then maybe more tourists will come ‘north’. But, until the new Game of Thrones airs, please be patient.
In all reality the wheels of change, and the government’s ability to encourage change, are slow. Really, really slow. But that doesn’t mean change isn’t happening, even if Martin McGuinness believes some unionists have never changed.
We all focus on the present. It’s human nature. We may look over our shoulders at the past and peer into the future, but we live in the moment. This is never more apparent than when you listen to bickering in the Assembly chamber as they engage in ‘debates’.
But fear not! That elusive thing called progress may actually happen. If the DUP’s Paul Givan can attempt Gaelic football anything can happen.
This progress can be seen through ye olde thing called money. Yep, good old pounds and pence can be the oil of progress. Sure, we are all still in a fluster about Brexit and Trump’s election but all is not doom and gloom.
The grumpiest Chancellor of the Exchequer in history, Philip Hammond, has loosened the financial straitjacket just a little.
Northern Ireland is to get around a quarter of a billion quid, as part of an infrastructure spending bonzana.
With the CBI claiming that every pound invested in construction generates three pounds for the economy, the NI Executive can stop doing the Lotto every week.
And, with Northern Ireland ‘s abundant supply of hot air (sorry, engineering skills and wind), it seems our expertise is once again proving an asset. Harland and Wolff have secured a contract for manufacturing parts of wind turbines.
Now, should they install wind turbines around Parliament Buildings they will surely generate enough energy for us to become self-sufficient in power for years to come.
