Ben Lowry: When spending cuts come across Europe so governments can spend on defence, wasteful Northern Ireland will be the first in line

They support almost every demand for more money, and reject almost every demand for NI to pay for some of the services it gets. So it is no surprise that Stormont struggles to fund childcare and cannot properly fund policing, or multiple other commitments.

Bear in mind that no matter how great the crisis in care or hospitals or schools, tens of millions of pounds will certainly be found for legal costs in legacy investigations, the great bulk of which will be into historic allegations against the security forces (see below). In these cases junior barristers will be paid more than consultant physicians earn on the NHS.

And there will be millions of pounds spent on contentious culture, things such as the West Belfast Festival which pretty much always ends up in a concert in which a crowd chants the provo chant Ooh ah up the Ra, and millions on the Irish language.

Meanwhile Stormont politicians have neglected the basics of our finances. Not only have they rejected water charges, so that our water and waste systems are in crisis, last year they only increased the regional rate by 4%, in line with inflation. They could have said that we are not bringing in water charges but instead we have to increase the rate by 10% to compensate for that refusal, or even by 7% to help raise hundreds of millions of urgently needed pounds. But no, the small 4% increase was touted as a triumph.

Stormont believes in low tax and high spend. Unionists join with nationalists, who want to imply that the UK is a mean and failing state, to blame London for the shortfall, thus alienating our paymasters.

There is barely an issue that MLAs don’t support extra demands. They supported the public sector strikes, leading to massive pay rises with minimal or no reform to working practices. They support grossly expensive public sector pensions that the 70% of people in NI who work in the private sector will never be able to enjoy, yet help to fund through their taxes. They support almost untouched welfare. When there are tentative steps towards reform, huge mitigation packages are demanded and agreed.

Essentially no-one argues against this. I tried for a while, almost a decade ago, to write articles and go on broadcasts that pointed out that having almost 12% of the Northern Ireland population on Disability Living Allowance could not be blamed on the Troubles, and was unsustainable. I got no support from any quarter, only abuse. Now the situation, in disability benefits, is far worse post lockdown. There was even greater uproar when I cited the evidently unsustainable huge increase in demands for children to be diagnosed as having Special Educational Needs.

Is it any wonder that there is no money to repair potholes? The simple, unglamorous things get neglected in the endless parcelling out of money to new groups of demands. Have you tried to make a right turn on a busy road when you can’t see clearly because the grass or hedges are not cut? These are elementary public services that used to always be provided.

I hardly need write another word about the health crisis, it is so obvious, except to repeat that we have now had almost a quarter of a century of expert reports saying that Northern Ireland needs a smaller number of better hospitals.

A massive crisis is coming in Europe in which we will all have to pay more money for defence. There will be huge cuts to waste such as cited above. And NI is one of the most wasteful.