Belfast Blogs.com

Yes, people. The peace dividend has arrived.450 public sector jobs to go in the Housing Executive. That's nearly five hundred people sacked from only one state agency.How many do you think will be sacked overall, once this wave of 'rationalisation' is complete?See, what people never realised was that there was in reality a civil war dividend in Northern Ireland.The stipend from the UK to the province was estimated conservatively at £6 billion. It didn't all go on security. It also went on the most bloated civil service in the Western world.That's coming to an end. For sure, in order to bribe everyone to stay inside Stormont, there will be a few hand-outs from London, Dublin, even from America and the EU.But in the long run, this is the future. The over-reliance on state and semi-state...

Rumours of imminent job cuts at Independent Newspapers are reaching my ears. Hopefully they aren't true, but the rumours do appear to be consistent and substantial.The Sunday Business Post and Roy Greenslade have already hinted at this, but what I'm hearing is genuinely disturbing.Is Gavin O'Reilly really intent on outsourcing the production tasks (taking journalistic copy and pictures and turning them into newspaper pages) on his national papers to an office in Armagh, where ad copy is already processed?Job adverts have already appeared in Armagh, offering salaries approximately half of what staff in Dublin currently receive. And if this is what's going on, then what will happen to the 200 or so production staff set to lose their jobs in Dublin?Not that the management like it, but the...