DUP runs Stormont, claims ex-SF member
AN ex-Sinn Fein member has said he left the party because the DUP are running Stormont and have the whip hand at all levels of the administration.
Gerry McHugh, Independent MLA for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, has rubbished claims that his main reason for quitting related to policing.
In a letter to the weekly Impartial Reporter newspaper, Mr McHugh sought to make his position clear because he said people in Sinn Fein were attempting to misrepresent him.
"The main reasons for my decisions (are) that the Assembly is being run by unionists, both at plenary and committee level and is strongly underlining British rule and the Union," he said.
"The DUP are extremely pleased with the way they have gained control over Sinn Fein; this is my major concern and one I could not have foreseen before the Assembly elections.
"Unionists have a majority at all levels, Sinn Fein can only deliver what unionists want."
Mr McHugh, in the letter, admitted he had signed up for policing last January, at a special Sinn Fein meeting in Dublin, but said that in
retrospect, mainstream republicanism could not deliver what was expected in return for this move: for example, the devolution of policing and justice powers.
The republican MLA's words will have been music to the ears of the DUP leadership, as last night Ian Paisley Jnr wasmaking similar points to an audience of party members in Ballymena.
He said that those hardline unionists attacking the DUP are stuck in a time warp. He claimed the DUP has delivered in the past year for Northern Ireland and the pro-Union community. And he outlined a vision for the year ahead – a vision he said his opponents do not have.
The DUP has ascended to the first place in government and to the responsibility of running Northern Ireland, he said.
"There are some who have described all this as 'treachery' and 'sell out' and it is not surprising where these cries come from," he said.
"Those who wish to be stuck in a time warp and who are not interested in seeing progress or advantage to the Ulster people will have their own explaining to do.
"They haven't the vision to see that progress can be something unionists are entitled to celebrate, enjoy and have earned. They live in a one-dimensional world that says all progress is damaging and only republicanism succeeds."
Among the achievements he claimed for the DUP were:
* Irish government ministers openly accepting that the constitutional question has been
"parked".
* Sinn Fein is working in a devolved government from Westminster at Stormont, a building they once shunned and a change from the "bring down the Stormont junta" rhetoric of the past.
* "Our children live in peace, no longer fearful of bombs in shopping centres or car bombs in their streets claiming them as legitimate targets like a generation of children before them.
* Northern Ireland is no longer in the grip of the bombs and terrorism of the past which haunted the families of so many of our brave security forces.
* Sinn Fein has had to take a public pledge to support our forces of law and order.
* The IRA has been forced to decommission.
* The country looks more certain than ever as an investment opportunity of a lifetime.
* The Union is now secured.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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