Editorial: This latest in a wave of strikes causes festive misery to traders and people without cars

Today everyone in Northern Ireland without access to a car will be badly disadvantaged if they want to travel a significant distance.​

Unless they are fit enough to cycle, prepared to do so in December weather and undertaking a journey that is doable by bike, they will have to take a taxi – or not travel.

All Translink services will be shut for the second day in succession. This means no trains, no buses to the airports, no rural services, no Gliders, no Citybuses, etc.

Not only that, it is happening at one of the busiest times of the year, when people use public transport to get into major urban centres including Belfast, to avoid Christmas traffic and parking challenges. They use it to go out at night and socialise so that they can drink alcohol but travel safely.

The industrial action by Translink will be repeated next Friday as well. Yet barely any politician has a word to say about it, except to blame the UK government, as Stormont politicians invariably do, or the DUP for not being in the assembly (which it is boycotting over a very grave constitutional matter).

Plausible arguments have been made for strikes in a cost of living crisis. Translink staff do a vital job, for which society is grateful. But there are equally plausible arguments against the waves of strikes, which are just not being made by local politicians, who would grant all pay rises because that is what they do – take easy decisions.

No-one makes the case that most public sector workers get generous pensions that private sector workers rarely get and that the latter help fund in their taxes. Barely any elected representatives make the case that hospitality and small businesses have suffered huge damage from this particular action.

We keep hearing that Stormont must return, despite evidence that it not only fails to improve things but in its cowardly failure to take any hard decisions at all it makes some things worse.