Come celebrate the Festival of Holi in Belfast today

Today  Belfast celebrates the Festival of Holi. 

A time when Hindu’s celebrate the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘bad’. The colorful festival is a time to bridge social gaps and renew sweet relationships. Its also famous for the ‘colour fights’ when crowds hurl coloured power at each other.

If you want to be part of the fun and celebration get yourself down to George’s Market between 1pm and 6pm today.

If you care about education, watch this….

This is the story of homework clubs with a difference and about really tapping into what we now call the social capital of a town. If you are interested in education, in children or in language watch it. By the way Roddy Doyle has recently opened one in Dublin called Fighting Words.

Platform for Change is launched

I have had the pleasure of being a member of the Platform for Change Management Committee for the past year or so. The Platform was launched today in Belfast.

It’s been an exciting time and great to see so many people, members of political parties, business types, community activists and ordinary citizens get involved in a political debate about the issues that matter to them.

The consultation meetings which took place with hundreds of people over the past six months were a real breath of fresh air. They proved to me that there is a huge appetite for real politics here in Northern Ireland and that people want their politicians focussed on the issues that matter.

I am in the Assembly to make the North work. Our ambition must be to build a strong region on Irish soil while respecting its inhabitants diverging national aspirations. The SDLP wants to make the North work because a strong North means a stronger Ireland. This is surely an ambition which we can share with the vast majority of people in this region. Platform for Change can play a big part in making Northern Ireland work.

Apology for child deportees welcome. Now lets see justice for the children who stayed and were abused

Patrick Murphy was born 16th March 1945 and forcibily sent to Australia from Nazareth Lodge in Belfast three years later. This morning he welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to apologise to all the children sent to the other side of the world without their consent from the late forties to the early seventies. 

Today’s apology is long overdue and will mean a huge amount to those little children, Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh, effectively deported from their own land by a state with a misguided aim.

Yesterday some of the other boys a girls who lived in Nazareth Lodge in Belfast with Patrick and who allege they were abused by the nuns who were caring for them met with Fr Tim Bartlett. It was the first in what will be many conversations about the past but an important first step.

The Minister for Health and I had an exchange in the Assembly too yesterday about the need for the Northern Ireland Executive to accept it has a duty towards the survivors of Nazareth Lodge and other homes. Whilst I do not for one minute doubt Micheal McGimpsey’s personal desire to see justice for these people, there is no indication as of yet that that his department or the Executive is ready to push the issue hard and send a clear signal to the survivors and wider society that this is a wrong that must be righted and soon.

New health budget needed now

The Assembly is debating the massive increase forecast in dementia numbers in this region today.  The Minister for Health is also making a statement on the North – South Ministerial Council - Health. 

I have asked the Minister to give a commitment to bring forward a Health budget which is capable of protecting front line services and maximising the savings available through closer North – South cooperation. 

We are currently spending £50 million a year on dementia in this region, yet the numbers people suffering from the disease will triple here in the next forty years bringing the total to around 50,000.  Experts estimate we will need to be investing some £200 million in coming decades to ensure adequate support for dementia sufferers.

The Minister’s unwillingness to provide any information on how he proposes to defend front line services and essential research will threaten many patient’s care. The Minister needs to bring forward now a new health budget which can give us all the assurance that the stealth cuts in front lines services will stop and stop now.

Fairtrade Fortnight starts today – Executive need to do a lot more

The Executive is not doing enough to promote Fairtrade products within the public sector and its International Development strategy which is now two years overdue.

I’ll be at the launch of Fairtrade Fortnight today in Parliament Buildings. They are calling it the “The Big Swap” this year and consumers are being invited to switch a regular item for a Fairtrade substitute.

The Executive should be leading by example by encouraging the procurement of Fairtrade products in all of its departments to demonstrate the North’s commitment to ethical trading.

Yes there is some commitment to using Fairtrade tea and coffee, but no steps have been taken to ensure that there is the option to purchase Fairtrade cotton uniforms or bed linen in the Health service.

 The Minister for Education has also confirmed that she is not aware of a single school which includes a Fairtrade option in its school meals contracts.

Sales of Fairtrade products now top €2.3billion annually. This puts money directly in the pockets of some 1.5million farmers in the world’s poorest countries, benefiting an estimated 8 million people.

Here in these islands consumers have embraced Fairtrade. Sales are doubling every year. It is time the Executive caught up and showed a real commitment to the developing world by creating sustainable trade opportunities for small nations.

The Executive is totally out of step with thinking in the North, given that Belfast is the only city in the UK and Ireland to be awarded dual accreditation as a fairtrade city, acknowledging the commitment demonstrated by people in the city to Fairtrade products.

Today, I am calling on the First and Deputy First Ministers to publish their strategy on International Development and to review their procurement policies to ensure that Fairtrade is promoted within the Departments and that consumers are given the opportunity to choose Fairtrade and help promote better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world.

Proposed policing protocol will undermine independence of Chief Constable

The SDLP  has warned that a British government protocol on policing, agreed by the police and accepted by the DUP and Sinn Féin, runs the risk of ‘driving a coach and horses’ through Patten.

Policing spokesperson Alex Attwood said the so-called protocol on policing architecture fundamentally changes Patten.
 
The new beginning to policing has been one of the big achievements of the past ten years.
 
This protocol runs the risk of seriously damaging the hard-won achievement of Patten.
 
Last Thursday a former Patten Commissioner advised the Policing Board that the protocol ‘profoundly distorts the Patten architecture and makes the Chief Constable dependent on the Minister for Justice and will have the affect of ditching carefully crafted statutory provisions on the independence of the Chief Constable.’
 
The SDLP agrees with the Patten Commissioner that this proposal flies directly in the face of a Patten warning on the political direction of policing.   
 
In the view of the SDLP, the protocol has the potential to return NI to a new era of political policing and we have advised the Secretary of State that we reject the protocol.
 
This weekend I spoke to senior police and expressed the grave concern that the PSNI could have accepted such a flawed approach to policing. Unfortunately the SDLP, alone of the main parties, sees the risk.
 
On Thursday of this week Martin McGuinness said at an Assembly Committee that ‘there is nothing in the policing protocol that changes the Policing Board’s statutory responsibilities.
 
He is clearly wrong and his words demonstrate that only the SDLP are looking out for Patten to ensure that there is no going back to the bad days of the old Stormont regime.

Putting Irish Unity on the Agenda

I am speaking at a conference on Irish Unity in London today organised by Sinn Fein. I’m on with Gerry Adams, Jarlath Burns, Lord Alfie Dubs, Mick Halpenny, Margaret Ward and Diane Abbot MP. We will be discussing the prospects for Irish unity.

Here is my speech:

The Good Friday Agreement changes the debate about unity in a fundamental way.The question goes from being whether there will be a united Ireland to when and how Ireland will be united.  The referendums on the Agreement were also a full exercise in national self determination by the people of Ireland.

I believe Irish Nationalism, including provisional republicanism, has not even begun to debate the type of Ireland we wish to build.

Will this new country be built on the very thing that has made it possible – the Good Friday Agreement – or will it be cast in the image of the 1937 constitution.

In other words do we want to build a Catholic and Gaelic Ireland or somewhere more representative of the true diversity on our island?

It’s a great pleasure to be in a Labour building; a place where social justice and equality are more than just slogans. Where working men and women are given a voice and where politics is about the interests of the many not the vested interest of the few.

One of the great tragedies of 20th century Ireland is that this politics took a back seat to national struggle. Partition and the emergence of the southern state set the cause of equality and social justice back a hundred years. It did not just divide our island but smothered any debate that sought to move beyond the national question. 

It gave rise to a tokenistic neutrality and protectionist economics; to armed republicanism and ultimately a dirty and futile war.

The question today is surely not whether we wish to simply reintegrate the national territory in the image of the Irish state but whether Irish men and women, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter wish a New Ireland to emerge.

An Ireland that reflects our diversity, built on good government and that places equality, prosperity and justice at the heart of everything it does.

My generation has been handed the keys to that Ireland. We are the inheritors of peace not the perpetuators of conflict.

We can open the door in front of us and with courage recast all about us or we can look back and repeat the mistakes of the past.

It is a tragedy that some young committed and passionate Irishmen and women are in a danger of throwing their lives away because they still cannot see the futility of armed struggle.  Our generation must prove through results that violence always fails, that another generation must not repeat the mistakes of the last and that it is persuasion not conflict which will bring about change.

The great poet John Hewitt was a proud Protestant, a proud Ulsterman and proud Irishman in a letter to his friend John Montague in 1964, he observed:

“By trying to waken folk to the concept of the Region, it seemed to me the necessary step to prize Ulster loose from the British anchorage: then and only then, when free in ideology, the unity with the other part of our island could be realised and established.

The North cannot be invaded, and taken by force in the Republic: if simply outvoted by a nationalist majority resentment would remain, but, realising themselves for what they are for the first time, not Britain’s pensioners or stranded Englishmen and Scots, being instead a group living long enough in Ireland to have the air in their blood, the landscape in their bones, and the history in their hearts, and so, a special kind of Irish themselves, they could with grace make the transition to federal unity.

I always maintained that our loyalties had an order to Ulster, to Ireland, to the British Archipelago, to Europe; and that anyone who skipped a step or missed a link falsified the total. The Unionists missed out Ireland: the Northern Nationalists (The Green Tories) couldn’t see the Ulster under their feet; the Republicans missed out both Ulster and the Archipelago; and none gave any heed to Europe at all. Now, perhaps, willy nilly bundled in the European rump of the Common Market, clearer ideas of our regional and national allegiances and responsibilities may emerge.”

You may like his words or loathe them but after 3,594 dead, 36,293 shootings, 16,209 bombing and attempted bombings and 70 years of old unionist discrimination they have a ring of logic to them.

They are the philosophy on which the Good Friday Agreement is built. That Ireland and its people have allegiance to region, to nation, to these islands and to this great continent. 

When I talk to young northerners I meet people who embody Hewitt’s dream; proudly Northern and proudly Irish.

Many are proudly British too and most happy to be Europeans.

The truth is the people of our region are not as divided as our politics suggests.

Irish nationalism can take the old road of a one size fits all future or it can walk a new one in which unity is neither a unionist nightmare nor a nationalist pipedream.

But to do that it must change and change radically.

First the very issue of unity needs to be elevated above politics. That’s why the SDLP has recommended the reconvening of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation to discuss unity. We owe it to ourselves as a nation to debate and agree a model of a united Ireland and to do so before 2016. We cannot be complete as a nation without a shared vision of our future. North needs south but south will need the North if a new Ireland is to emerge and the absolute potential of our island is to be fulfilled.
 
Secondly we need to make the North work. Ignoring the opportunity of regional government is to ignore the common ground on which a new Ireland will be built.

That means maximum devolution but also imaginative regional solutions to local problems. Its means real power sharing that is capable of building the best education system in Ireland, defending the NHS – a British institution made Irish in Northern Ireland.

It also means getting serious about the economy because we will never build a strong all Ireland economy if we have a weak northern one.

We need to make the North a place where sectarianism is the real enemy and government leads the fight against it. 

A strong North means a strong Ireland. A weak, underperforming and politically dysfunctional one means a weaker Ireland.

Our home is a region of Ireland. Our dream is for it to flourish under the flag of our nation. Others hope it will remain a region of the UK. But we all surely agree that it is our region and needs governed for the benefit of all our people.

That is the as yet unfulfilled opportunity of the Good Friday Agreement. To build a great region on Irish soil, united in a common desire to see their neighbours flourish.

Where culture is shared; where the GAA is honoured and celebrated, never politicised and denigrated. Where the weave of diversity is strong and common ground is worked.

Where endeavour and enterprise are promoted and where prejudice is rejected.

The old Ireland aspired to a separate but equal relationship with others. It adopted an old fashioned conservative and British view of equality.

It cast progressive and labour politics aside in favour of a great nationalism that could bind a nation in a common struggle but was incapable of accommodating those who did not fit with its sense of identity.

The New Ireland must honour those who believed in their cause whether we agree with it or not, but it must not repeat the mistakes of their past.

James Connolly’s assertion that “The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour” can become the words on which a new Ireland is borne and when we remember the centenary of his death in 2016 we do so having agreed as Irishmen and women what a new united and free Ireland will look like.

We will honour his dream by ensuring that in the twenty first century labour need not wait. That progressive national politics is a possibility.

That two centuries and ten years after Tone professed the unity of the people of this island, his dream can finally become a reality.

Platform for Change to launch next week – new politics for a new North

On Thursday, February 25, Platform for Change, a new citizen-based policy platform is being launched in Belfast . It has been the product of several months of deliberation involving hundreds of people from across Northern Ireland .

It is a response to the widespread frustration about the continuing polarisation of our society and the policy inertia at Stormont, in the face of severe problems confronting ordinary people in their everyday lives.

The launch will take place at 12.30, in the Black Box on Hill Street . It will involve a range of personalities from various walks of life who are endorsing the platform.

Changing political identities in Ireland

I debated John McCallister MLA (UUP)  and Prof  Brian Walker of QUB at a fringe meeting during  SDLP Conference. Alan Leonard (aka Mr Ulster) captured some of it on video.

20100206 SDLP 11 McDevitt McCallister Walker from Mr Ulster on Vimeo.