Ex-Alliance councillor says Sinn Fein 'need to be more generous' - adding their Irish signs policy has backfired
A councillor who has just quit the Alliance Party has said that Sinn Fein is not being “generous” in its attitude, including in its stance on Irish language signs.
Eric Hanvey told the News Letter he would “probably” still vote for Alliance, though he is “disillusioned” with politics in general.
He announced on Monday that he will now sit as an independent on Belfast City Council, reducing Alliance’s influential 12-seat bloc to 11.
He will stand aside when his term ends next year.
Representing Lisnasharragh in the east of the city, he was elected twice (in 2019 and 2023) and describes himself as having been on the “progressive” wing of the party, which he criticised for taking part in Northern Ireland’s “travesty of an executive”.
Party politics has “never worked at Stormont since the Good Friday Agreement” he said, and it would have been better for Alliance to sit in opposition instead.
Sectarianism remains Northern Ireland’s “key problem” he said.
He was asked if he would lay the charge of sectarianism at the door of both Sinn Fein and the DUP and, if so, whether one is worse than the other.
“I think they’re different, but I do think at the end of the day they both play to their audiences rather than taking things forward,” he said.
“To be frank now, I’d say I can understand it more in terms of the DUP because I think they’re under pressure from the TUV, they’re losing vote share generally across NI, whereas on the other side Sinn Fein, you could argue, are the winners – their vote share is increasing, the demographics are in their favour, and the potential for a united Ireland has certainly increased over the last couple of decades.
“But they don’t tend to behave like winners.”
Instead, he said, they tend to “push a very limited agenda” and not be “generous”.
He said that GB political issues are increasingly coming into council, and “a lot of it has absolutely nothing to do with the role of council or the powers that we have”.
It was put to him that some people feel that way about the recent flying of the Palestine flag from city hall – something which was backed by Alliance. Does that count?
“Yes and no. Voices of solidarity are okay, whatever it happens to be that you’re showing it for,” he said.
“It’s something a council can do.”
Rather it is the “discourse” that surrounds such issues that is the problem, he said.
What of Sinn Fein’s Irish language sign policy in Belfast – does he think it is divisive or sectarian?
“It’s not something I think should be divisive,” he said, noting that other parts of the UK have dual-langauge systems.
“But having said that again, they way it has been dealt with within council has not been helpful, has not been edifying from either side of the side of the argument in my opinion.
“If you’re saying you’re coming from a sort of ‘supporting the Irish language’ perspective, then I don’t think it has helped that – I think it has hindered it.
“I think there is this sense from me that Sinn Fein need to recognise that they’re no longer the small party, they’re in the ascendancy and they need to be more generous and they need to work with people.”
In his lengthy resignation statement, posted online, Mr Hanvey, who has a master’s degree in economics, criticised his former party for “continuing to endorse the neo-liberal concept of balanced budgets”.
He also said that the party “could have and should have done more to condemn [Israel’s] atrocities” in Gaza and he attacked the Cass Review, which criticised the state of transgender medicine in GB, as a “perversion of the process of evidence-led policy making”.