Letter: Let the DUP stay out of Stormont and the rest of the parties go in

The DUP and TUV together have a mandate from the 30% of Northern Ireland electorate to stay out of Stormont and they should honour their promise by remaining out of the Stormont executive until 2026.

However, 70% of the NI electorate chose other parties who have a mandate to enter Stormont and deliver good government.

We have two competing mandates and the mandate to set up a Stormont executive is more than double that to keep Stormont closed.

What should the British government do?

The Tory party have been happy to ignore rules or to break the law (in a specific and limited way) when it suits them, yet they hide behind the pretence that they cannot move without the permission of the DUP.

Could it be that the Tory party are happy to see an expensive and troublesome part of the UK slip away?

The Tories seem untroubled by the chaos in our local hospitals and NHS, the underfunding of NI schools, the mismanagement of sewage and farm waste resulting in Europe’s largest freshwater lake becoming an open cesspit.

Yet the Tories could be in government for another full year, do they have the courage and integrity to act.

It seems we have two sensible options:

1. We abandon Stormont for a few years with junior ministers appointed to run Northern Ireland

2. We change the rules at Stormont so that no single party with less than 40% of the vote can suspend the assembly – this can be done with primary legislation at Westminster by the Tories as they have done with the Legacy Act.

Option 2 is my preferred option because it excludes no-one, allowing the DUP to opt in to the executive or exclude itself as it chooses.

Nationalists will argue that there is a third option, that the DUP have shown that Northern Ireland is a failed state and that we should announce a border poll perhaps for five years’ time to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

As a unionist, I suggest we must try one of the other two options first and that we should not continue to fool ourselves that the Westminster Framework is about to be withdrawn.

Arnold Carton, Belfast BT6