“TREASURY reserve” sounds like a particularly dry sherry. In fact it is the emergency fund for UK government departments, to be used as a final resort in “genuinely unforeseen, unaffordable and unavoidable pressures”.

Money must be repaid, although without interest, so it is an advance rather than a loan.

Devolved administrations can also request an advance. Stormont has been granted £400 million to be repaid over three years, despite the £400m shortfall in its draft budget being long foreseen and entirely avoidable.

The Executive has countless options to close the gap through spending cuts and revenue-raising. It just refuses to take them.

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Sinn Féin finance minister John O’Dowd will use the money to smooth out large overspends in health and education.

Ministers in those departments would otherwise have had their overspends this year subtracted from their budgets the year after.

This is a clever move but by far its best aspect is that the Treasury is demanding Stormont opens its books for a thorough review of how it manages public money.

Unless there is serious reform during the respite O’Dowd has bought, he is only kicking the bottle down the road.

Precedent is not encouraging: this is hardly the first time London has given Stormont extra help in return for promises to do better.

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The PSNI has issued 27 pages of service instructions to officers on how to deal with paramilitary displays, including flags.

A loophole will also be closed in the Terrorism Act so items can no longer be defended as ‘historical’ – 1912 UVF flags would be the obvious example.

Deputy chief constable Bobby Singleton said “not making a decision, doing nothing or failing to act is not an option”.

But he added that people should not expect officers to run around taking down flags. That is “possible, but not likely”, he told The Irish News.

The service instruction is more a clarification than a new policy. While that should help with enforcement, excessive legalism can be an excuse to do nothing.

As the guidance notes, it may be the responsibility of the Department for Infrastructure to remove flags from lampposts.

But officers can still do it anyway in most cases and they have clear powers to use against anyone who tries to stop them.

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The section of the Terrorism Act related to paramilitary displays was used eight times more against republicans than against loyalists over the past decade.

News website The Detail obtained the figures: of the 94 prosecutions between 2015 and 2025, 83 related to republican groups and 11 to loyalists.

The imbalance is unsurprising as dissident republicans are the only paramilitaries still considered terrorists in practice and their ‘uniforms’ at shows of strength attracted most police attention.

This is legally awkward, as the letter of the law makes no distinction between all proscribed groups. But what really jumps out of the figures is how few prosecutions there are in total.

The capacity of the criminal justice system is vastly smaller than the expectations the public places on it.

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Even when the DUP and Sinn Féin agree to help Gaelic games, it ends up in a tribal argument.

Both parties had decided at a Belfast City Council committee to end concerts at the Boucher Road playing fields and restore the land to its original purpose by building two Gaelic pitches and one soccer pitch.

When other parties raised concerns about the loss of revenue and lack of alternative concert venues, the DUP defended the decision by noting an under-provision of Gaelic pitches across the city.

But as concern grew, the DUP joined the UUP, Alliance and the Greens at a full council meeting to have the decision paused.

Sinn Féin’s council leader, Ciaran Beattie, responded: “There’s one word to describe this and it’s discrimination, and it’s because of what it is.”

It would be better to describe the initial decision as premature.

While the full council vote did include an orange/green split, it was more interesting as an illustration that the Greens, not Alliance, hold the balance of power. Belfast’s two Green councillors delivered the 30-28 result.

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Alliance and the SDLP have had an argument over how the justice minister is appointed.

SDLP opposition leader Matthew O’Toole said nationalists are “prevented” from taking the role. Alliance leader and justice minister Naomi Long replied the post is open to any MLA who secures cross-community support, a comment Mr O’Toole found “offensive”.

Mrs Long is correct in law, although Mr O’Toole might say he is correct in practice.

It is past time the justice minister was appointed under the d’Hondt process alongside with the rest of the Executive.

One reason the SDLP could still be overly sensitive on this question is that it should have gained one Executive seat when the post was created in 2010. Instead, Alliance got one more seat than it was entitled to.

However, that was a fluke of assembly arithmetic at the time and the process was changed in 2014 to ensure it cannot happen again.

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The Republic is to roll out bus-mounted traffic cameras nationwide after a successful trial in Cork.

Cameras were fitted to several buses on one route in the city for 11 weeks, with footage analysed by artificial intelligence. Over 7,000 violations were detected in bus lanes, yellow box junctions and on double-yellow lines.

Many buses in Northern Ireland already have forward-facing cameras, or fittings for cameras, but they are not used for enforcement due to shortcomings in the law.

There have also been persistent rumours that Translink fears its staff and vehicles being attacked.

It will become increasingly untenable not to make use of this technology as it is deployed around the world.

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Artificial intelligence is good at analysing images but bad at answering detailed specialist questions – 50% accuracy would be typical.

That has not deterred two Stormont departments, health and the economy, from considering using it to answer written assembly questions.

Both departments are working with AI companies to explore the possibility, although they stress answers would still be checked by civil servants and approved by a minister. That would definitely prevent any nonsense getting through.

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The assembly has passed a motion of no confidence in DUP communities minister Gordon Lyons, following a report from the standards commissioner on his lack of “empathy” during last year’s racist rioting.

No confidence motions have always failed before, for one of two reasons.

If they call for a minister to stand down or be suspended, they require a cross-community vote under the law enacting the Good Friday Agreement. Unionists or nationalists never agree to evict one of their own.

The SDLP got around this by not calling for Lyons to go.

Any other no confidence motion against an MLA or minister has previously been blocked by a petition of concern.

However, a reform agreed under the New Decade, New Approach deal and put into law in 2022 means petitions can no longer be used for anything that “concerns a sanction in relation to the conduct of a minister or other member of the assembly”.

Lyons was not sanctioned – that has to be recommended by a cross-party committee, where community vetos still operate informally. But he was scolded and the scolding passed.

The motion might have seemed pointless but it was a minor landmark for the SDLP to have got through the bars and planks of Stormont’s ugly scaffolding.

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