Below is Mr Allister’s speech during the debate on the election of a new Speaker:
“Mr Acting Speaker, what we are seeing today, and what we will see in a few minutes, is the first down payment by the DUP to Sinn Féin arising from the Stormont House Agreement — the delivery of this side deal. Three months ago, Mitchel McLaughlin was unelectable. As far as I am concerned, he is still unelectable, because he is still the same Mitchel McLaughlin, who, with great notoriety, told the general listening public that that most cruel of crimes, the kidnapping, murder and secret burial of Jean McConville, was not a crime. Yet there are some in the House who think that someone of that mentality should be made Speaker of the House. The shame is, of course, that those unretracted remarks will mark the future Speaker of the House as someone who is prepared to take that stance and who has been put in that position by many of those who say that they would abhor such comments.
“Of course, the position he aspires to — the Chair, as it were, that he wants to sit on — was once occupied by Sir Norman Stronge for more than two decades. What happened to Sir Norman Stronge? He was done to death most cruelly — shot and incinerated by an IRA attack on his home. One asks Mr McLaughlin this: was that a crime? It seems that some who are going to vote for him neither know nor care whether he thinks that was a crime. We know what his party president thinks of the murder of a previous Speaker of the House, for he is on record as saying:
“The only complaint I have heard from Nationalists or anti-Unionists is that he was not shot 40 years ago.”
“Someone of that ilk, who thinks that the murder of Jean McConville was not a crime, now aspires to hold the position of Speaker courtesy of the votes from the DUP Benches. There are some in the DUP who, in the past, have gone for a walk rather than vote for such matters. Today I suspect that they are going to walk through the Lobbies. The next time they walk past the memorial to Sir Norman Stronge may they hang their heads in shame.”