Newsletter opinion piece
08 November 2008
Today the first conference of Traditional Unionist Voice will provide hope and confidence to Unionists across the Province who rightly reject IRA/Sinn Fein in government and the system which put them there. It will also resonate with tens of thousands of ordinary families who are deeply disillusioned by the latest failing attempt at Belfast Agreement devolution.
The shambles at Stormont makes the case against unworkable mandatory coalition better than any words of mine. The reality versus the fantasy that was promised could not be more striking.
We were all assured that never again would Sinn Fein hold government to ransom and if they did there’d be in place a workable default mechanism to put them out. That is how St Andrews was sold. How different the reality has turned out to be: a can’t meet, won’t meet Executive, utter despair brought to pupils and parents by the chaos visited on education, a Stormont increasingly irrelevant to the massive economic pressures on every family and nothing to show for the huge public cost of this experiment. Have we ever experienced worse government?
No one should be surprised that when you clutch to the bosom of government those with no interest in good government for Northern Ireland – for such would undermine their central tenet of the unworkability of this political entity – they will do exactly what it says on the Sinn Fein tin.
In face of such predictable wrecking the First Minister is impotent to act, because the office which he holds only has power when Marty agrees. The unchanged republican veto allows Sinn Fein to wreak havoc as they please.
At the heart of the problem is the crazed system of mandatory coalition, which implants every Party for ever in government, with no need to reconcile their contradictory policy demands. So little wonder it plummets into deadlock.
This week the greatest democracy in the world elected a new President. If mandatory coalition applied there the loser, Senator McCain, by law could say, “never mind the voters, I’ll be Joint President”. That is how ridiculous the concept of mandatory coalition is.
Why should we be the only place in the western democratic world subjected to this absurdity? We wouldn’t be if those still propping it up had the courage to kick away the props.
Voluntary coalition is the workable route to shared government. No party is strong enough to form a government on its own, so a coalition is inevitable. But it must be a coalition which will work. Those who can agree and command a sufficient majority and those who cannot form a vibrant opposition, with the option of voting one coalition out and another in at the next election. That is democracy.
The argument against voluntary coalition is “oh, you can’t have devolution without Sinn Fein in government”. Why not? Because, some whisper, we might go back to “the bad old days”. Who would take us there? Surely not those we are assured have given up violence for good? If Sinn Fein are only playing the role of democrats so long as they stay in government, then we are being blackmailed as well as conned!
Now is the time for Peter Robinson to face reality and go to HMG and say, “We tried your mandatory coalition, it doesn’t work, will never work and if you want devolution in Northern Ireland, then it must be, as elsewhere, on the basis of voluntary coalition.”
In that he would have the support of all Unionists – those who thought Sinn Fein was fit for government, those who thought it was worth giving them a chance and those of us who said they were never fit for office. Therein is the route to unionist unity.
