Tag: Northern Ireland Assembly

Karen Bradley has admitted that before becoming Northern Ireland secretary she was profoundly ignorant of the country’s political divisions and “slightly scared” of the place. She said she was unaware that nationalists did not vote for unionists and that unionists did not vote for nationalists – the most elementary fact about Northern Ireland politics. “I freely admit that when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deep-rooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland,” Bradley told House magazine, a weekly publication for the Houses of Parliament. “I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa. “Actually, the unionist parties fight the elections against each other in unionist communities and nationalists in nationalist communities.” Minister announces pay cut for Stormont assembly members Read more Theresa May appointed Bradley to the post in January – succeeding James Brokenshire – at an exceptionally sensitive time because of Brexit and the breakdown in Stormont’s power-sharing government. Theresa May sent the former culture secretary to Belfast supposedly as a safe pair of hands. “That’s a very different world from the world I came from where in Staffordshire Moorlands I was fighting a Labour-held seat as a Conservative politician and I was trying to put forward why you would want to switch from voting Labour to voting Conservative. On Thursday she said their pay will be slashed after 19 months if the devolved government is not restored. Their pay would fall from £49,500 to £35,888 in November, with another reduction of £6,187 three months later if the assembly did not resume its work, Bradley told MPs. She ruled out immediate elections for the devolved assembly, which has not operated since power sharing between the DUP and Sinn Féin collapsed in January last year, and announced plans for civil servants to have more powers to implement policies.

Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, resigned in protest and subsequent elections saw his Irish nationalists Sinn Fein party almost win power. As the UK government's ranking official on issues related to Northern Ireland, Bradley has been tasked with leading the efforts to restore power-sharing to the region. On Friday, politicians in Northern Ireland reacted with dismay to Bradley's published remarks, accusing her of adding to the troubled atmosphere of the region's politics. "We are not surprised that a British government minister did not understand the intricacies of politics here in the North," Colum Eastwood, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, told Al Jazeera. "The British and Irish governments, as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, need to meet urgently to agree a package of legislation to get Stormont back up and running. Border concerns The implementation of 1998's Good Friday Agreement requires cooperation from the British and Irish governments. This week, the Irish government announced they would seek a separate agreement with the European Union on the status of the border to avoid further delay in agreeing its form. In the case of a "hard Brexit", no agreement would be reached and a presumptive "hard border" would return - along with checkpoints, as was effectively the case throughout the Troubles from the 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement 20 years ago, and vastly increased waiting times for cross-border trade. In Northern Ireland the issue of amnesty for the Troubles is a controversial one: bloodshed was not one-sided and the legacy of violence is inherently complex. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.

That wasn't quite the case in July: It saw the prime minister make a trip to Belfast, MPS voted to suspend DUP MP Ian Paisley from Parliament and a court ruling led to significant ramifications for what decisions civil servants at Stormont can take without ministers. The public inquiry was set up to investigate that claim, and to establish why the Northern Ireland scheme did not contain the same cost controls as a similar scheme in Great Britain. There has been virtually no progress or anything resembling a new approach at Stormont since talks collapsed in February, and Northern Ireland has now been without government for 19 months and counting. In July, Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Leo Varadkar said his government and the UK government were planning a new round of talks for the autumn - but there's been no confirmation of a date yet. One thing is clear: the relationship between the DUP and Sinn Féin seems as bitter now as it did when Stormont first collapsed. The 30-sitting day suspension, which is due to start on Tuesday when Parliament resumes after summer recess, also triggered a recent addition in UK politics: the recall petition. It means if 10% (or 7,543) of Mr Paisley's constituents in North Antrim sign it, he loses his seat and a by-election will be held. The petition is due to close on 19 September. Well, 29 September means there will be exactly six months left until the UK is due to leave the EU - and there's still plenty that needs to be sorted out. The stumbling block remains avoiding a hard Irish border, and no doubt there will be much talk about it over the course of September, ahead of the crunch EU summit in October.