If elected bodies spend too much then someone, somewhere has to pay

The council confirmed earlier this month that it was almost £70 million in debt. Millions of pounds a year is being spent just in servicing that debt.

As a consequence, ratepayers in the borough will have to pay an extra 7.65% in their domestic rates and the popular Portrush Air Show has been axed.

It is not the only council to be sharply rising its rates:

Ards and North Down, which also has a very large debt, is putting up its rates by 5.64%. Various other councils are putting up their rates by more than the rate of inflation.

In a sense it is all simple. If governments or devolved administrations or councils spend more than planned, they have to raise it. There are only three ways of doing that: increase taxes/rates, increase borrowing or get someone else to pay. In the case of Stormont, that someone else is the UK Treasury, but such limitless funding is far from guaranteed, as recent events have shown.

In due course we will find out more as to what has happened financially in places such as Causeway Coast and Glens and Ards and North Down. In the former, we can already see that the freezing of rates for three years was a bad decision.

The suggestion by a councillor in that local authority that councillors themselves should experience a 50% cut in their pay and expenses will win some public sympathy.

Cases of extreme financial shortfall in councils that can be shown to be attributable to demonstrably bad political decision making should be publically identified as such. Voters can then assess that information in future elections.

In particularly extreme cases, where basic services are affected, then the politicians themselves should indeed also have to trim their own financial sails accordingly.

The notion that public money grows on trees is a widespread and seductive one, but it always causes fiscal damage.