OFMDFM Abusing Office to Suppress Political Dissent
06 July 2011
Statement by TUV leader Jim Allister:
“During a budget debate on 27th June in the Assembly I drew attention to the funding crisis which had hit innocent victims’ groups. In the course of my remarks I said:
“Sadly, a lot of this goes back to politics. It goes back to action by the First Minister’s office on 18 February 2010, when, out of a fit of pique over a publication by one of the victims’ groups that critiqued the Hillsborough agreement, an edict was issued to pursue that group. The product of that was the denial of funding. Yet nothing of substance has been found against that group. It cannot go on. It is the sort of thing that any Government worthy of the name would have arrested in its tracks and dealt with a long time ago.”
“The email in February from the First Minister’s principal private secretary to Community Relations Council chief Duncan Morrow illustrates that OFMDFM were intent on cutting FAIR’s funding not because of any genuine concern about the group’s use of public money but in order to suppress political dissent.
“The situation is all the more galling when one considers that the Ti Chullain terror centre has been in receipt of tens of thousands of pounds of government funding while explicitly glorying the actions of IRA terrorists.
“I often hear a lot of talk about the funding Stormont is providing to the victims’ sector but I see precious little evidence of the same when it comes to the innocent victims of IRA terrorism. Throughout the country there are groups which have been starved of funding for months. So just where is all this funding going?”
