Cronyism and jobbery - says who?
|12:45 UK time, Thursday, 16 August 2007
There's nothing like a quiet summer's day in the newsroom. That's when journalists have too much time on their hands. So I decided to take a trip down memory lane, and while ploughing the archives found a little gem about junior ministers. In December 1999, when David Trimble and Seamus Mallon appointed Dermot Nesbitt and Denis Haughey to their £55,000 a year posts, they were accused of wasting taxpayers money. One MLA declared it was "an unnecessary indulgence," and complained of too little democracy and too much bureaucracy.
Whooooooooooo said that? Why none other than the current junior minister Ian Paisley Junior of the DUP.
Another critic piped up: "This is the most blatant case of cronyism and jobbery imaginable."
The critic? None other than Sinn Fein's Conor Murphy. Now what would the Sinn Fein junior minister Gerry Kelly say about that?
The only person who perhaps has no regrets about his 1999 remarks is one Robert McCartney, UK Unionist who dismissed these "baby ministers" as "gofers" or "friendly little piglets."
I'm 
