Purvis: confidence needed
THE PUP held its annual conference at the weekend. Political editor STEPHEN DEMPSTER went along to see how the party is reasserting itself, post the David Ervine years.
UNIONISTS have nothing to fear from the devolution of policing and justice or the creation of a law protecting the Irish language, Dawn Purvis has confidently declared.
At her party's annual conference, in the Stormont Hotel, Belfast, on Saturday, the PUP leader said fellow unionists in the DUP and UUP were wrongly creating political and cultural battlegrounds out of these issues.
On policing and justice, she said the suggestion that there could be some type of republican infiltration of the security network was "a lot of nonsense".
While on the Irish language, she called on the DUP to wrest control of the debate by bringing forward proposals for a 'language act' to cover Irish and all minority languages.
Ms Purvis' speech focused on the key issues dogging the peace process, at present – and offered alternative views from within the working-class strand of the unionist family.
As Ulster's only female political party leader, the East Belfast MLA gave a punchy performance.
Yet for a party with the motto of Moving Forward, there was, in her address, and from other speakers still a sense of coming to terms with the past, and with the loss of David Ervine, who was name-checked frequently from the podium.
Even within the first sentence of her speech the PUP leader recalled her predecessor and mentor, before launching a stinging attack on the DUP and Sinn Fein, which Mr Ervine would doubtless have approved of.
She noted that, a year ago, she had said to conference that "the country is crying out to be governed as we have been neglected for so long", but she had also feared people's expectations may not be matched.
One year on, she added: "I had hoped to be proven wrong – sadly I was not."
Ms Purvis said, with irony, that the DUP and Sinn Fein had worked really hard – "hard to make unionist and republican dissidents relevant"; playing into the hands of the Real IRA on one side, and the Traditional Unionist Voice, on the other.
Of the DUP, despite power-sharing she agreed with Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams that there are those in the party that "don't want a Catholic about the place."
Instead, they believed they could still "smash Sinn Fein or get one over on them by preventing the devolution of policing and justice or the Irish language".
And of Sinn Fein, it was the PUP leader's view that they "don't want a Brit or a British symbol about the place".
She explained: "They are Good Friday Agreement 'deniers'. They refuse to recognise Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, they shave 'gov dot uk' off their email, they use the Irish language as a barrier, they argue for the removal of the Union Flag, they think they can hide the fact that they are administering British rule by exaggerating their republicanism."
And so, on the headline issues that the parties cannot agree on, she offered her own PUP policies:
l The Irish language: "We have nothing to fear from the Irish Language. How Sinn Fein has used it to exaggerate their republicanism is damaging to the language itself.
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Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 29 May 2012
Today
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Temperature: 12 C to 21 C
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