Article by TUV Leader to mark 10th anniversary of establishment of Belfast Agreement devolution

05 December 2009

The News Letter edited out some of the punch of the article, so here is the unedited version, with News Letter omissions highlighted:-

10 years on from our first taste of Belfast Agreement devolution some, who made careers and political advance out of denouncing the Good Friday deal, are now its chief operatives. The cover for their power hungry volte face is the deception that at St Andrews they transformed the Belfast Agreement beyond recognition and danger.

For all the marginal tinkering at St Andrews, the essential structure and architecture of the Belfast Agreement remains:

Mandatory coalition - designed to guarantee terrorists in government and preserved by denial of the basic democratic right of being able to vote a party out of office;

The Joint First Ministers Office – built on mutual veto which guarantees its dysfunctional failure;

The insidious cross-border bodies – designed to evolve the all-island agenda.

In 1998 Peter Robinson rightly said this:

“The Union binds Northern Ireland to the rest of the United Kingdom. This Agreement deliberately prises it away and enforces a rolling scheme of all-Ireland harmonisation and integration with only one ultimate goal in view, Irish unification. No other outcome is anticipated. The structures in the Agreement are not an end in themselves but are delivered only as a transitional arrangement.”

It should not be forgotten that the Belfast Agreement’s endorsement of the pan-Nationalist contention that it is “the Island of Ireland” which alone is endowed with the right of self-determination, still stands; as does the repeal of the 1920 Act, which was such a central part of the title deeds of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty over Northern Ireland. Thereby the mooring ropes that bind us to GB were untied.

Each of the attempts at Belfast Agreement devolution has abjectly failed. If fell apart under David Trimble and it is again disintegrating before our eyes on the DUP’s watch. Far from delivering good government it has become a byword for lamentable failure and endless deadlock, with the chaos in education typifying its hopeless performance. There is not a more wretched failing government anywhere in Western Europe. Direct Rule at its most inept was more efficient. Yet, some would impetuously demand and others would prepare to gift it more powers, even the most sensitive powers of all, those over policing and justice. Such unbridled madness!

Mandatory coalition will never work. Its deviant concoction of mutual vetoes for mutually exclusive political ideologies is doomed to fail. Enforced by the outrageous denial of the right to vote a party out of office and the ban on an Opposition, it is the very antithesis of democracy. Those who pretend they will change it from within are indulging in deception on a par with their past pretence that they had in fact got rid of the Belfast Agreement. The same republican veto which blights mandatory coalition’s operation will equally block its removal.

Only the election of sufficient Unionists determined not to operate mandatory coalition will force the negotiations which will see its demise. Certainly voting for those who keep mandatory coalition going day and daily will never advance us towards democratic voluntary coalition.  TUV in Stormont will be the catalyst for positive change.

If, which is not our desire, executive devolution cannot be set up on a satisfactory democratic basis, then the only option is to make Direct Rule more accountable and acceptable. We would work with the new Government to provide the maximum accountability in these circumstances and attempt to integrate Northern Ireland more firmly within the United Kingdom.

NI politics