Ah, Norn Iron politicians. Aren’t they just adorable crazy stupid?

Example: Sinn Fein has put forward its proposal to close the £1.9 billion gap in local finances, and I must say that the ideas are pretty daft. Well, most of them are.

• Pay cut for politicians of 15% – actually that makes a bit of sense. Well done.
• The 4 Northern Ireland banks to loan £400m to something that the politicians like – this would be fine except for the way that one of the banks is owned by RBS and therefore by the state, another is currently for sale because its parent bank needs to raise ten billion euro in the next two months, and the other two are hardly champions of free money…
• The Housing Executive to be allowed to borrow £150m – brilliant, when the whole point of the cuts on a national level is to stop growing the public sector debt, just open new lines of credit…
• And my favourite, a £2,000 per month tax on mobile phone masts. I don’t have figures for NI, but UK wide there are apparently 52,000 base stations, so the national bill would be £1.25 billion. Considering that no business is going to bite a bill like that without passing it on to the public, and considering that there are about 70 million mobile devices, that comes to about £18 per device. I’m sure we’d all like to thank SF for thinking outside the box on this one and bringing in a new drain on our finances that they’d then blame on private companies for not just paying the tax bill themselves…

So, all in all, I’m not really a fan of their proposals. Could you tell?