Email Reveals Grassroots DUP Unease Over Maze Plans
25 April 2013
TUV leader Jim Allister has said that an email sent to supporters by the DUP shows that there is growing unease within the party about the Maze.“The fact that the DUP have felt it necessary to send a mass email about the Maze is conformation that they recognise the growing unease even among their own supporters when it comes to the issue – as so there should be given the party leadership’s corporate roll over to Sinn Fein/IRA on the issue.
“What is striking about the email is the selectivity of the information provided, including the total failure to explain why it was right for the DUP to oppose the stadium because of the unconnected prison buildings, but right to support a conflict-related project whose setting gives the IRA citadel buildings focus and public profile.
“No one is accusing OFMdFM of building a shrine at the site. The shrine does not need to be constructed because it is already there in the form of the H-Blocks and hospital buildings, just waiting for terror tourists once the site opens up. This could never have happened if successive DUP Environment Ministers had not declined to de-list and demolish the buildings. Nothing is said about the boast of former IRA Hunger StrikerRaymond McCartney that: "The listed and retained buildings...will be open to the public. There will be the opportunity for the many stories of the gaol to be told."
“Mr Robinson says that victims have been misled. It is frankly insulting to dismiss the concerns former RUC and Prison Officers and numerous victims groups across Northern Ireland have expressed in such a backhanded manner.
“As for his claims about the economics of the plan - with its proximity to the M1 and our ports and airports the Maze certainly has huge economic potential but why blight the site by retaining the prison buildings which will inevitably become a shrine to terrorism? Indeed, the Maze Prison buildings are already drawing tourists on special trips organised by a Republican ex-prisoners organisation!
“Why feed the controversy surrounding the site by building a huge “Conflict Transformation Centre” right next door to the buildings which housed the people who caused the conflict in the first place?
“And if the site has similar economic potential to the Titanic Quarter or Canary Wharf – a comparison made by the champions of this project - why build a centre which is forecast to run at a loss of over £500,000 a year on the site?
“If we are to have a Peace Centre why build it right next door to the buildings which housed those who robbed Northern Ireland of peace in the first place? Why not build it on a green field site and leave the Maze purely to economic development?
“The harsh truth, of course, is that Sinn Fein will not agree to it anywhere else and what Sinn Fein wants, Sinn Fein gets.”
