THE decision to freeze student fees here seems to be going down well, but it won’t come without cost. And that cost – half of it – will be borne by the Department of Employment and Learning. It would be difficult to argue that learning should come at the expense of employment services in the middle of a recession when the jobless total is almost twice what the department is budgeted to deal with. As the Minister said in June, …
In the end, I never got round to reading the 150 page Alliance manifesto before the election. On Friday night, the five main parties informally ran d’Hondt to select their ministries – and announced the informal selections via the Executive’s twitter account, controversially some suggest – allowing them to spend the weekend making informed choices about suitable ministers from their elected MLAs. With nine ministries selected, Alliance had no option but take the remaining Department for Employment and Learning as …
