Northern Ireland has seemed invisible at Conservative conference, says veteran journalist

​Gary Gibbon, who is political editor at Channel 4 News, has been coming to such party gatherings for decades, so the News Letter asked him about our sense that NI has been barely on the radar this year, or even mentioned at fringe meetings and seminars.1

Mr Gibbon said: “It's very rare for Northern Ireland to be this invisible in party conference season but it is pretty much invisible On the very fringes you can find people who are very interested in Northern Ireland, a few of them, there aren't many, the parties haven't come over in strength, the DUP used to come over.”

He also said: "You do find some people who say, have a running conversation about whether Jeffrey Donaldson might or might not take the DUP back into Stormont. You find some people in the Conservative Party who are kind of fingers crossed that he will because that would round off as they see it, the Sunak achievement with the Windsor Framework. But basically, it's not really getting talked about.”

Asked why he thought that was, Mr Gibbon said that sometimes – for example when there was a minority Conservative government – “the DUP have come to these conferences in numbers with a shopping list” but that this year he did not get the same sense of DUP demands.

The party has not in fact come to the conference this year.

The Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug Beattie MLA was in the Manchester Convention Centre for the conference on Monday.

He told this newspaper: “It's important that we engage with government and here we are at a conference where the UK government has all come together, there's people here from the ministers for health, for education, for defence and of course the secretary of state and as well as other internationals including the EU Ambassador to London.

"There's no point standing on the peripheries shouting and making noises.”

Mr Beattie said that for the last 18 months in Northern Ireland “we have had no devolved government. It has achieved absolutely the sum of zero”.