The day before the over-hyped vote

If ever you wanted an argument for devolution of more power to the NI Assembly, this morning’s interview with Secretary of State Shaun Woodward was surely it.

He subjected us all to what could only amount to emotional and political blackmail threatening the future of the Assembly if all MLAs did not vote for the devolution of Policing and Justice tomorrow. It was the perfect encore for Naomi Long who in did the Alliance-NIO talking yesterday also threatening the stability of the region if everyone did not get into line and fast.

The DUP and SF do not need the SDLP or UUP’s support to win the vote tomorrow. They have enough votes of their own. My point – if the DUP and SF want to proceed with devolving power they can!

I am not sure the UUP are right in opposing the principle of devolving policing and justice powers which is what tomorrow’s vote is all about.  Personally I can’t wait to get Mr Woodward and his like out of our hair although that will be easier said then done given that the DUP and SF have agreed to let him remain in control of key aspects of security policy.

We were promised at Hillsborough that things would get better on the real issues that matter to people here. So far there is no evidence that . No paper on a Shared Future, no paper on parades, not a line on education, the budget crisis or health.

Even on the inside the DUP-SF axis looks more like a panto then a serious power sharing government.

Public meeting – attacks on the elderly

Representatives from the PSNI, Age Concern Help the Aged NI and Belfast City Council have been invited to attend the public meeting which will take place on Thursday 11th March at 7pm in St Brides Parish Hall, Derryvolgie Avenue, Belfast.

I am organising this meeting to give concerned residents the opportunity to speak to local representatives and statutory agencies to voice their concerns about the latest burglaries. I would urge as many people as possible to come along and be apart of the community response to these attacks.

It is important that we pull together as a community and work alongside the statutory agencies to ensure that these attacks on the elderly members of our community are put to an end.

Regional action on ‘legal highs’ needed

It was disappointing to get news yesterday that the Health Minister has missed the second British Irish Council meeting in a row to discuss the misuse of drugs in Britain and Ireland .
 
He is sending out all the wrong signals about tackling the drugs trade and consumption across these islands. Last week’s meeting of the British Irish Council discussed the availability of legal highs as well as the drugs crisis in prisons.
 
Minister McGimpsey should have been present for this important discussion to demonstrate his commitment to tackling this problem. He needs to send a much stronger message about the need to deal the drugs crisis, which is particularly severe here in Northern Ireland .
 
Some paramilitaries are now taking matters into their own hands against legal high outlets.
 
Along with the justice agencies, the Minister needs to take much greater control over this issue and move very quickly to control the import and distribution of legal highs as well as educating young people as to the serious health risks these present.
 
The British Irish Council will not meet to discuss drugs for another year.
 
It is time for the Minister for Health to bring forward proposals immediately to deal with legal highs.

Alliance Party fail to support Bill of Rights in key Assembly vote

The Alliance Party engaged in some political gymnastics yesterday to avoid having to support a motion calling for a strong Bill of Rights.

Having voted in favour of an SDLP amendment which strengthened the motion, Alliance MLAs with the exception of Stephen Farry made a bee-line for the door to avoid havingto vote on the substantive motion. Mr Farry stayed in the chamber and abstained in person.

Why?

Well I can only surmise that they did not think the amendment would pass and when it did they panicked because it might embarrass their new bosses in the DUP if the the Assembly were seen to support a Bill of Rights.

I thought my colleague Dolores Kelly put it well:

We had generally assumed that Alliance were on the side of the angels on human rights in general and the long, hard struggle for a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights in particular. The motion before the Assembly was critical of the British government’s approach which ignores the work done by local people on the Human Rights Commission and Forum, including Alliance members.

We called on the government to extend the current consultation on a bill of rights and Alliance supported our amendment. But when it came to the substantive motion they suddenly disappeared and it was voted down by the unionists.

The issue of rights strongly protected and enforced in law goes right to the heart what has divided our society, and in our view a Bill of Rights has the ability to take basic human and civil rights completely out of the party-political arena. Today they went back into the arena with a bump due to the increasingly odd behaviour of the Alliance party.  We hope this does not represent some new departure or unionist line-up as part of dropping their claim to be an opposition party. That would be a great blow to our hopes of a shared future.

Derry execution to lead Assembly business

A series of statements on the execution of Kieran Doherty in Derry last week will be the first item of business in the Assembly today.

Mark Durkan will lead and remind the Assembly that the murder bears the hallmarks of the old Provo-style ‘execution’ which people had hoped was in our past.

You can follow it live at noon here:

http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/stream.htm

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.

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.