
West Belfast: Fire service in attendance at 5G mast blaze
The Northern Ireland Fire Service (NIFRS) is currently attending a fire at a 5G mast in west Belfast.Two fire appliances and one aerial appliance were dispatched to the blaze on the Colin Road.There have been a series of arson attacks on 5G masts in west Belfast, with the fire service recording 13 incidents between January 2023 and December 2024.The MP for the area, Sinn Féin's Paul Maskey, said it's "shameful that another vital phone mast has been vandalised tonight."
"This will only cause more issues for local residents who will lose even more phone signal," he added.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said a fire at a mast on the Stewartstown Road on Wednesday, and a fire on a different mast at an industrial estate in Dunmurry on Saturday were both deliberate.Maskey said the attacks "are causing serious harm to our community and putting lives at risk"."Those involved in targeting vital infrastructure in west Belfast must end this reckless and destructive behaviour."He said his party "completely condemn these attacks. They must end now".

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The Independent
27 minutes ago
- The Independent
Rachel Reeves has bet all our money on Wes Streeting saving the NHS
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The health service received the most generous settlement on Wednesday, planned to grow by three per cent more than inflation over this parliament. There are those – and Nigel Farage is one of them – who will mutter 'bottomless pit' and 'good money after bad'. Those of us who are a bit more sophisticated will mention the NHS productivity crisis. Before the spending review, for example, I pointed to figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing huge increases in the numbers of doctors and nurses in the NHS over the past five years, and small increases in the number of patients seen. But I also cited evidence that NHS productivity was improving after the one-off shock of the pandemic and now there is more hopeful news to share. Reports are beginning to emerge about what is in the 10-year plan for the NHS to be published by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, next month. It sounds like a good and ambitious plan to shift incentives so that patients are kept out of hospitals and needless in-person appointments are abolished. Speaking to The Times, Streeting said: 'Much of what's done in a hospital today will be done on the high street, over the phone, or through the app in a decade's time.' It might seem a bit slow. He has been in government for nearly a year and is only now coming up with a plan? Government is slow – Keir Starmer has taken to asking repeatedly, 'Why not today?' – but it is important to get big changes right, and Streeting has thrown himself at a lot of the less visible work in his first 11 months, including abolishing the NHS England bureaucracy and taking the NHS back under the direct control of his department. He has learned the lessons from the last time Labour saved the NHS under Tony Blair, including bringing back some of the key people who did it: Alan Milburn, Blair's health secretary, and Michael Barber, the head of his delivery unit. The blueprint is all there in a new book, The Art of Delivery by Michelle Clement, my colleague at King's College London. It is based on Barber's diaries and is the fullest account of how the public services were turned around in Blair's second term as prime minister. The book makes clear what ought to be obvious, which is that it takes time for the combination of more money and reform to start to change measurable outputs, and even longer before the general public notices an improvement. Nor is improvement a steady upward gradient, because there are policy mistakes and personality clashes along the way. One of Barber's greatest strengths was his ability to manage relationships put under strain by politicians' impatience for delivery. When one permanent secretary ranted at him for giving his department a traffic-light rating in a note to Blair without consulting him, Barber said: 'This has always happened. I'm just telling you.' Now it is happening again. The good civil servants and NHS managers will realise that it helps them to have objective performance indicators and stretching targets if the whole service is starting to move in the right direction. Barber had to persevere for two years before the indicators started to shift, but in the NHS the momentum of change gathered pace thereafter. By 2004, Barber told the cabinet that an episode of EastEnders showed Ian Beale complaining that 'people spend at least five hours in A&E', to which Jane, his wife, responded, 'It's a lot better nowadays.' 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Telegraph
32 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Starmer's Chagos surrender ‘will cost £5bn more than feared'
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The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Campaigners consider legal action against Scottish government after supreme court gender ruling
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