Madam, - In November, the British Government announced massive cuts to two major training schemes in Northern Ireland. The Worktrack programme, which provided 26 weeks of work-based training is being done away with, while Learndirect, an online learning scheme, is also facing the chop.
It was reported that the savings would have a significant impact on the community groups that deliver the schemes, but at the time, the Employment and Learning Minister, Barry Gardiner, said spending had to be prioritised "to best achieve the government's objectives".
Those objectives are now becoming clearer, because what the Minister appears to have forgotten to tell us is that two months later, reports would emerge of a representative for the Prime Minister sitting down with a terrorist organisation discussing the merits of spending £70 million to set up - wait for it - a job-training scheme for the UDA.
Has the government gone mad? How can it possibly justify closing down legitimate schemes and replacing them with training for terrorists? Who will control and distribute the funding - because, as we all know, where grants and funding are available, "community representatives" (code for paramilitaries) are already reaching for the forms. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with applying for what is there to be claimed, but what makes terrorists more deserving of training than ordinary people?
What the UDA is seeking equates to a very costly form of jobs for the boys - not just in terms of the abuse of taxpayers' money, but in the morality of closing down legitimate training schemes and bringing in one to be run by a sectarian mafia. Has Tony Blair not yet learned that rewarding terrorism doesn't end it, it encourages it. Why does the UDA bother extorting money from businesses any more, when it can get a hand-out from the PM? If the UDA gets what it wants, it will amount to employment being created at a cost of £70,000 per hood over three years. As someone said the other day: "What are they training them to be - astronauts?"
It might be worth the money if those behind these proposals were stuck in a rocket on a one-way ticket to a galaxy far, far away. Certainly the Westminster Government is not of this planet if it is seriously considering spending my money and yours in such an immoral manner.
Last month we saw the biggest bank robbery in UK history carried out by paramilitaries. This month we are witnessing the biggest bribe in history. - Yours, etc.,
Cllr SEAMUS CLOSE, MLA, Alliance Party Spokesperson on Finance, Stormont, Belfast 4.