It seems that someone was actually considering staging “Jerry Springer: The Opera” at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.

It is, of course, possible that they were figuring that having the DUP et al picket the production, with all the accompanying publicity, would be a good thing, allowing them to slash their marketing budget by 90%, and that this was actually a well thought out proposal. But if so they overlooked one rather important fact. Belfast Waterfront Hall is actually operated by Belfast City Council, rather than the private sector, so the Council has to approve everything that happens there.

And, as one might expect, they refused, “in the light of the potential of the production to cause grave offence to a considerable number of the citizens of Belfast”.

I’ll leave the social commentary to one side, and instead focus on one other major benefit to having the minutes in a wiki that I missed in my earlier post. The “official” minutes, whilst theoretically available on-line, are very far from easy to link to. They’re hidden behind a log-in (it may be one which automatically logs you in without you really knowing about it, but it still has an annoying habit of logging you out when you idle to long, and forcing you to “log in” again), a clumsy search engine, and are in Microsoft Word format, and although the search engine can display these as HTML, it’s all controlled via a JavaScript interface which makes it pretty much impossible to link to directly.

On the wiki the minutes become first class internet citizens.

Maybe in time the official minutes system will allow for this, but given the difficulties the Council appears to have with internet technology, I’m not expecting this any time soon.