Baroness Paisley says DUP '˜hiding from the truth' of Stormont crisis

Baroness Paisley has claimed the current political deadlock at Stormont would not have happened if her husband and the late deputy First Minster Martin McGuiness were in power.
Baroness PaisleyBaroness Paisley
Baroness Paisley

The wife of the late Ian Paisley said both the DUP and Sinn Fein need to “confess where they’ve gone wrong - cut out all nonsense and lies and come back and start anew”.

The Province’s two main parties have blamed each other after negotiations aimed at restoring devolution failed last week.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Sinn Fein claims a draft agreement – which included an Irish language act – had been in place before the DUP pulled the plug on the talks.

However, the DUP has insisted there was no draft deal.

Speaking on BBC Radio Foyle, Baroness Paisley said the big issue was that “people do not face up to the truth; they need to be honest with one another”.

She said that if today’s politicians “had followed the example that the late Martin McGuinness and my husband set for them, this would not have happened”.

When asked if she included the DUP in that when she said people weren’t facing up to the truth, she said: “That’s right. They’re hiding from the truth. And you must be absolutely honest with one another because there’s only one way to be honest when you’ve made a mistake and it’s to confess your sin and confess your mistakes because no one is perfect.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

She said that her husband and Martin McGuinness “wouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place” because “whenever things go wrong you’ve got to put them right and you’ve got to go to the basis of where they went wrong and put that right.

“If you’re the first minister, you’ve got to put things right; if you make a mistake - and nobody on this earth has lived without making a mistake....if you’re a minister and someone in your department does wrong, the buck stops at your desk and you have got to do what is right and stand down from your position until the matter is sorted out.

“I think if that had been done at the beginning, there would be a different situation here at the moment and we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.”

She said she didn’t think there was a need for “a stand alone act on any language because as far as I can see there is no barrier to the Irish language in NI”.