The NI Housing Executive office in Richmond Chambers in the centre of Derry is to be closed within six months

The NI Housing Executive office in Richmond Chambers in the centre of Derry is to be closed within six months. The office in the Diamond, a prime location accessible to all, will be sold off to private interests.

The 186 NIHE workers involved and more than 20 careers and training staff are to be shifted to other premises. They don't know where, or exactly when, or whether they will be transferred as a unit, or broken up.

They have gathered that the main workplace will be in a building already in public hands and held freehold. This would seem to rule out the city centre.

The proposal makes a sort of sense. No point flogging off the family silver and then buying replacement cutlery which is just as good, or which comes at a comparable price.

The implication for job numbers is not clear. But we can safely assume that the final figure will be 186 minus rather than plus. Fewer jobs, worse conditions, a less accessible service for the public.

Similar developments are under way, or about to get under way, elsewhere, as the dismantling of the Housing Executive proceeds apace without attracting particular interest, much less triggering a hullabaloo, among mainstream political parties.

Operation Dismantle The Housing Executive is being run by the Strategic Investment Board (SIB), an unelected body answerable in theory to the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister. The SIB is, effectively, the Executive's privatisation unit.

As the board's website explains, "SIB is monitored by the Public Private Investment Unit within the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister". Not many people will have known that the machinery of OFMDFM includes a component for driving privatisation.

The Executive parties may be somewhat curtailed in what they say about the fate of the NIHE, given that they endorsed a strategy of privatisation when they signed up to the Stormont House Agreement. The strategy was already in train.

But the Stormont House Agreement enshrined it in an agreement presented as a hard-won achievement by dedicated negotiators, another significant staging-post along Peace Process Way.

Paragraph Five of the Stormont House Agreement includes a commitment by the Executive to adopt, in January 2015, a "comprehensive programme of public sector reform and restructuring, which will encompass a wide range of strategies, including measures to... reduce pay bill costs, such as a reduction in the size of the NICS (Northern Ireland Civil Service) and the wider public sector".

Ditch as many workers as you can entice into redundancy schemes and curb the wages of everybody left. Paragraph 11 declares that, "Executive departments should also consider how best to realise the value of their capital assets through reform or restructuring to realise income and longer-term savings".

Sell off anything that the private sector thinks it can make a profit from.

Taking the terms of the Stormont House Agreement together with what's happening on the ground, it becomes clear that what was put together at Stormont during the wrangling and recrimination of recent months is not a cobbled-together arrangement to carry the institutions through to the next crisis, but an ideological convergence of longer-term significance.

Contributors to BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback will continue to exchange unpleasantaries over which party stood steadfast to "protect the vulnerable" and which curled up and allowed the Treasury to roll over them.

But there's no way of reading the paragraphs dealing with the economy other than as embrace of a free-market strategy which even some conservative commentators are beginning to question.

By any measure, the Housing Executive represented a progressive break with the past when it came into operation 45 years ago. It expressed the ethic of the Welfare State, seeking to put the public good above factional interests and private greed.

Now it is being parcelled up for privatisation, with scarcely a cheep of protest from anyone in authority.

It should be kept in mind, too, that the "capital assets" whose value is to be "realised" under the Stormont House Agreement include not just office buildings, but the homes of close on 80,000 families.

Thatcherism with, so to speak, a vengeance.

The suggestion lurking at the edge of many a media debate and even learned analysis, that the economic aspects of the Stormont House Agreement are a necessary element in the only strategy available for consolidating peace, is a nonsense, an insult and a threat.

Belfast Telegraph