Contrary to what Gerry Adams thinks, Ladies and Gentlemen. That should cover you all, unless there are some puffed up Lemmings and Pygmies here.
I certainly trust there are no thugs in the house.
Think of it: the DUP puts and sustains the IRA in government, but it is this Traditional Unionist they choose to call a thug! If asking hard questions of a squirming, shifty Special Adviser draws the wrath of his DUP protectors, then, so be it. I think the treatment meted out to courageous Cllr Jenny Palmer by that same individual came far closer to thuggish behaviour.
Welcome to North Antrim – the place whose MP has brought a whole new meaning to ‘rent to buy’. Use public money to pay exorbitant rent to a frontman so that the party can pay off its mortgage and acquire an asset debt free. And if you are a stamp collector, David McIlveen knows a quiet little garage from which you can hoard stamps. Just what a paperless office needs!
You might have thought you’d go to a post office for stamps and a garage for oil, but it seems not. And speaking of oil, it seems they have been having very cold winters in Londonderry. Lord Hay has been feeling the cold. Now, he’s feeling the heat; and as for Arlene, don’t make her cross by mentioning the cost of office space in Kesh.
It hasn’t been a good week for some, but TUV has had a good year. More people than ever before voted TUV this year. I thank the party for all the effort that made that possible. And here in North Antrim it was particularly pleasing to give a certain party a good kick up the Bannside. Well done Timothy Gaston and Stewart McDonald. Well done to all our candidates.
And one of the immediate effects of 76,000 votes for TUV was to give the DUP a crick in their neck; and with all these cuts there is no treatment for it. It comes from constantly looking over their shoulder at TUV. There are 76,000 reasons why a DUP MP, who lavished millions on the Irish language when he was culture minister, is now so anxious to play to the gallery by discovering a liking for yoghurt.
The TUV message is resonating more than ever with the electorate. Even the First Minister borrowed our script to declare Stormont is ‘not fit for purpose’. We’ve been preaching that for years.
But what is Mr Robinson doing about it? Nothing! If you lived in a house that was condemned as unfit, what would you do? You’d get out! But what does Mr Robinson do? He calls in the cowboy builders and bandits, who made it unfit, to see how they can patch it up. Instead of laying the axe to the root of the problem, he orders up the sticking plaster.
Make no mistake, that is what the current talks are all about. It’s the parties of failure scrambling round to patch up the collapsing edifice, before it crashes down on top of their ministerial limos.
And, of course, the talks are carefully constructed to exclude anyone who’d point out these uncomfortable truths. Oh yes, room for the ROI, with whom DUP are happily sitting and with whom all papers are being shared, but no room for the mandated voice of traditional unionism.
On 22 May over 100,000 unionists voted for a vision totally at odds with the perpetual failure of Belfast Agreement devolution. Almost one third of unionists who voted did not vote for DUP or UUP, but most of them voted TUV. Yet, deliberately and consciously, the representatives of those 100,000 are shut out of these talks…because it’s not about righting the wrongs in Stormont, it’s about finding a self-serving, face-saving bandaid to keep it together. To keep the gravy train on the tracks. And what a corrupt gravy train it has now been exposed to be.
Sinn Fein, not satisfied with the Northern Bank proceeds, has been ripping off the taxpayer by laundering public money to the tune of millions through bogus cultural societies and bogus research companies. Francie Molloy and culture in the same sentence? That’s enough to alert you that all is not as it seems. If ever there was a need for a vigorous police investigation, this is it, but, once more, will truth and justice be sacrificed on the altar of protecting the process? Probably, because in the new Northern Ireland, because of the corruption of the Belfast Agreement, protecting the process trumps everything, including truth and justice.
And how is Belfast Agreement devolution working out? It is an unmitigated disaster. Log jammed on everything, delivering nothing and lurching from one crisis to the next. And yet there are some who foolishly clamour to give this useless, failing Stormont more powers, and, unbelievably, even fiscal powers. No one in their right mind should wish tax-raising powers on Stormont, be it corporation tax, or any other significant fiscal power. They can’t handle the powers they have. The loonies really would have taken over the asylum if Stormont was given tax-raising powers.
This Stormont executive has become a byword for chaos, waste and inaction.
Here we are facing the closure of hospitals and drug addiction units, while Stormont itself is a waste machine. £5m on spin doctors, £50,000 per week on wining and dining; £2m on special advisers – over twice what is spent in Scotland and four times the cost of SPads in Wales, over £150m during this Assembly term on the useless North/South bodies, £16.5m pa on 367 staff in OFMDFM – more than twice the staff of the Prime Minister. 36 of them their own private spin doctors – and with all that they still can’t con the public – and, wait for it, 124 in the “equality and strategy unit”. Strategy, what strategy? As for equality, ask Asher’s bakery about where the OFMDFM equality strategy lands you – in court for daring to exercise your freedom of conscience. And, who funds the thought police that masquerade as the ‘Equality Commission’? Peter and Marty, of course. It is their budget which sustains them to persecute those who dare to have principles. Ashers are being dragged through the courts on funds supplied by OFMDFM. And then the DUP tell us how much better things are under Sinn Fein/DUP misrule.
But, of course, this week when Gerry’s mask slipped. We got a telling revelation of the real purpose of the so called equality agenda. Something much more significant than him calling us ‘Bs’, was this illuminating admission, “Equality is the Trojan Horse of the entire republican strategy.” Gerry Adams, not noted for his truthfulness, never spoke truer words. Good job it was recorded or Gerry would have even denied he was ever in Enniskillen!
Equality is the Trojan horse of the entire republican strategy, operating right under the nose of the DUP, because it is in OFMDFM that responsibility for equality resides.
And how does the Provo perversion of equality manifest itself?
· The Royal Ulster Constabulary disbanded in the name of equality.
· Orange marches blocked in the name of equality.
· The Union Flag torn down from Belfast City Hall in the name of equality.
Even the fundamental democratic rights to change your government, vote a party out of government and even have an opposition – all dispensed with in Northern Ireland in the name of equality.
So, yes, we see, we know, we live under the jackboot of Provo equality.
Never forget this basic reality. Sinn Fein, who did their utmost, through their IRA, to destroy Northern Ireland, are not in Stormont to give you good government. No; for them, it is another Trojan horse. They are not there to make Northern Ireland succeed. No, for them it’s a golden opportunity to fulfil their own prophecy of Northern Ireland as a ‘failed political entity’. Hence their enthusiasm to bankrupt it, as we’ve seen graphically in their budgetary antics this year, and their fifth column use of power to peddle their pernicious and perverted ‘equality agenda’.
Whoever else might be cosying up to Sinn Fein in government and sustaining them there day and daily, I’m proud of the fact that this party, often alone, refuses to bow the knee to their tyranny. Some in the DUP tells us they don’t like power-sharing; they just like power! Ours is no phoney battle with Sinn Fein. TUV stands immovable against the Sinn Fein strategy, all of it, all day, every day and against the structures that empower them to deliver their pernicious agenda.
And it is those structures that must change if Northern Ireland is ever to have durable and workable devolution. Mandatory coalition is the very antithesis of democracy. There can be no places as of right for anyone in government. No party is big enough in Northern Ireland to form a government on its own, so a coalition is inevitable. But it must be a coalition of the willing. Those who can agree on what to do about welfare reform, education, the economy, health, and who together can command the requisite majority, they – whoever they are – form the government. And those who can’t agree – whoever they are – form the opposition. That is the route to shared and workable government. And if it needs the added protection of an attainable weighted majority on key issues, then TUV is open to discuss that. But mandatory coalition is out. Robbing the voters of the right to change their government is out. Denying even the basic right to an Opposition is out.
For us it is about workable devolution, not the dogma of inevitable failure so evident in mandatory coalition. Whether this Stormont executive implodes this year, next year … implode it will, because it defies the basic rules of democracy; when you don’t have to be agreed about anything in order to be in government, of course, once in government paralysis, discord and logjam will ensue. Only the glue of some semblance of power holds it together, but one day even that will give way to the inevitable collapse of a system that can never have democratic credibility.
And, of course, it is TUV’s mission to hasten the day when it is put out of its misery.
This year we had over 76,000 voters sharing our vision. Give me 76,000 TUV voters, and more in the next Assembly election and I guarantee you Stormont will never be the same again. You’ve seen what one determined TUV voice can do, strengthen my hand with multiple TUV MLAs and watch the edifice of misgovernment crumble and fall.
It needs to be done and with your help and that of every democrat determined to rid us of the failures of this pitiful Stormont it can and will be done.