DUP put your pound in Dublin’s pocket – Allister
10 February 2009
Responding to today’s debate in the Assembly on the North-South Ministerial Council Jim Allister said:
“The motion tabled in the names of David Simpson and William McCrea is totally disingenuous. While it seeks to portray the DUP as anti-North/Southery the reality is very different. Far from working towards the abolition of the North-South Ministerial Council, at the last meeting of that body two new additional levels of Dublin interference were discussed - a North South Consultative Forum and a North South Parliamentary Forum. The DUP is building up North-Southery, not destroying it.
“Additionally, correspondence which I had with DFP last year revealed that the DUP controlled ministry rubberstamped every single request from the North-South bodies established by the Belfast Agreement. And every body saw its funding increased. So much for the pre-devolution boasts of addressing the imbalance between North-South and East-West!
“The DUP know fine well that today’s motion has zero chance of achieving anything because of the veto which Republicans have over everything that happens at Stormont. But worse than that, they know that for all their posturing they have accepted the very North-South arrangements which, as Peter Robinson once said amounted to
“a direct tangible legislative link with the Republic through All-Ireland bodies. The distinction between Northern Ireland and the Republic has been torn away, under this deal North and South come closer together and Northern Ireland ever more distant from Great Britain”.
