Many readers will be wishing Andrew Magorrian, Glenn Donnelly and Barry Brown well in their campaigns in the Westminster general election set for May 7th. They are standing for Cista, in South Down, North Down and West Tyrone respectively. Cista stands for “Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol”. They are “looking to foster an intelligent, mature debate about the merits of legalising cannabis.”

If they manage that, they will have achieved a great deal. In recent weeks, South as well as North, senior police-persons have been on the airwaves inviting congratulation for seizures of weed and blathering nonsense about dope leading to inevitable disaster.
The Cista Three will be able to point out that tax revenue from cannabis sales in Colorado has been ring-fenced for the upgrade of run-down schools. Thus, legalisation of cannabis has done nothing but good for the young people of the State – one of three, and more on the way – to have adopted a common sense attitude to the question.
The Three could usefully quote also from the latest edition of “Contingencies”, official magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries, the folk who spend their waking hours analysing risks, estimating losses, setting the levels of insurance payments.
“Recreational marijuana users enjoy better physical fitness and get more exercise than non-users” and “have even been shown to have higher IQs,” the magazine observes. “The tide is turning. Life underwriters would be wise to be at the front end of this curve, and not stubbornly digging in their heels to the detriment of their products.”
Lower insurance payments for dope-heads! Now there’s a slogan which might take off.
At any rate, if the three take my advice they will quote the wise words of the actuaries in all their election literature.

I am told I have been denounced in the pages of An Phoblacht for having made a speech Sinn Fein didn’t approve of at a union rally in Derry on March 13th in support of public sector workers striking against a threat to their jobs – part of the austerity programme brought in by the Tories across the water and being passed on to the North by the DUP/SF-led Executive at Stormont.
Twenty thousand jobs are to go, 1,500 of them in Education, a department headed by SF’s John O’Dowd. Funding for the arts has been slashed. The Nerve Centre, which has played a brilliant role in the development of music and trained a stream of young people in the graphic arts has been badly damaged. The same is true all over the Six Counties. The axe on arts was wielded by culture minister Carál Ní Chuilín.
Sinn Fein’s line is that if they used the effective veto which they hold and refused to implement the cuts, it would be impossible to set a budget, the Assembly would collapse and peace would be put at risk. Not so.
Peace in the North does not depend on the survival of Stormont. The key factor has to do with the settled unwillingness of the vast majority of citizens – I’d say 98 percent, minimum – to accept any return to shooting and bombing as a means of making political progress.
Not that shooting and bombing has ever led to progress. The great bulk of the reforms which ended the sectarian State have been in place since the early 1970s, achieved by the mass civil rights movement.
The alternative to imposing austerity measures is not to impose them, if necessary to walk away from the Executive and help organise mass resistance, coordinated with the movement against austerity in the South. Now there’s an all-Ireland dimension which an all-Ireland party which boasts that it stands on the Left should surely embrace.
If the Assembly collapsed, what a splendid turn of events – a Northern crisis which has nothing to do with Orange-Green squabbling but over an issue which could bring working class people on all sides together.
Maybe they don’t agree with the choice which I advocate. But there is a choice, and they have made theirs.
Endanger peace? Far from it.

I gather that a consensus has developed that youngsters need positive role-models amidst the temptations and hurly-burly of modern life. If that’s so, we should urge all to take their lead from QPR’s tough-tackling midfielder and captain, Joey Barton. Joey was among a list of “celebrities” asked in a magazine feature last month what his first act would be were he to become Prime Minister.
(Ok, he shouldn’t stamp on people or shove referees. But he’s only flesh and blood and is constantly being provoked.)
Here’s his reply: “All public money will be withdrawn from religion. Taxpayers money will cease to sponsor religion in any and every form. I would dis-establish the Church of England. CofE bishops will lose their right to hold unelected positions in our House of Lords... All tax payer funding for faith-based state schools will also cease. If parents want to teach their children in their own homes then they are free to do so... It is not the state’s business to subsidise the training of a child for one religion... The ghettoisation of religious teaching in State schools, and the ghettoisation of religious communities which one-sided and narrow religious teaching promotes will end.
Go on. Disagree with that...
As far as I know, there isn’t a single TD in Leinster House, from Left to Right, who speaks such glowing common sense on the issue.