The SDLP as a party should be ashamed of themselves for entering the powerless opposition benches.
Why would Colum Eastwood dupe his electorate like this? Surely if he had stated his desire to opt out of government prior to the last elections, he’d have found himself with considerably fewer MLAs.
Colum is now Mike Nesbitt’s number two, because Mike can justifiably consider himself leader of the opposition parties.
When Mike beats his chest in the coming months and years, people will listen, it will be an alternative view and he will see himself as a self-appointed policeman towards SF/DUP policies
But what will Colum and the powerless SDLP be doing? They will have two choices – agree with everything Mike says or fly in the face of the UUP and back Sinn Féin the odd time to suit their nationalist background and principles.
Yes, the SDLP can propose their own recommendations and policies, but who really cares and how will this help the very people who voted for them?
SF and the DUP surely will be entitled to cherry pick any good suggestions the opposition might have, repackage them and pass it off as their own.
The SDLP have morphed into the Alliance Party – nice to have them around but if they left the stage would it really matter?
NIALL KEENAN
Cookstown Co Tyrone
PBP up for challenge of overcoming long-standing division
The election of two People Before Profit candidates in the recent assembly elections – with Gerry Carroll topping the poll in West Belfast – has thrown the political establishment and the punditry into a state of confusion. Jim Gibney (April 27) warned readers to reject the ‘small left-wing parties who side-step or ignore... issues of injustice and discrimination’.
This followed closely on his party leader’s claim that PBP was a ‘two-nations’ party that endorses partition. Fortunately the electorate was wise enough to ignore both of them. This side of the election pundits want it the other way around: they strain to dismiss our mandate as a ‘green’ vote, writing off our anti-sectarian message and the possibility that we will win a substantial following outside nationalist districts.
Brian Feeney (May 18) lifting his argument from Niall Meehan’s letter that appears on the same day, claims that this is a ‘fantasy’.
Niall Meehan’s calculations are faulty – they say nothing about PBP’s first preference votes on the Shankill, for example, or about our result in North Belfast. But the more revealing thread in both pieces is how deeply invested they are in the stale politics of the past. There is nothing remarkable in the fact that the majority of our votes in the Foyle and West Belfast came from nationalists who previously voted Sinn Féin. Nor do we underestimate the challenges ahead as we seek to push out and build an anti-austerity fight on both sides of the sectarian divide.
No-one is naïve about the difficulties this entails, but nor do we share Feeney’s pessimism that a party committed both to leading the fight against austerity and to Connolly’s vision of a 32-county workers‚ republic will be met with mob violence on the Shankill or the Fountain. It is one thing to admit that overcoming long standing divisions is serious work: PBP are up for that challenge and all that it entails. But it is another to insist that these divisions are set in stone and immutable, as both Feeney and Meehan imply.
To date the establishment north and south have built the crisis-ridden peace process around two pillars – opening up the north to corporate plunder and imposing a kind of benign apartheid on the most deprived communities on both sides of the sectarian divide. What has that delivered? Crippling austerity in the running down of the health service and privatisation of our public services; the imposition of zero hour contracts, exorbitant student fees and economic uncertainty for the post-ceasefire generation. PBP aims to use its foothold in the assembly to build opposition to that regime in every working-class community. If that aspiration has the establishment rattled, so be it.
BRIAN KELLY
People Before Profit, Belfast BT12
Derry too wants its ‘helping’ of well-paid jobs
McCann’s your man and Foyle Independent Dr Anne McCloskey came close to being ‘Anne’s your woman’. Between them they got near 8,000 first preference votes. This out of a total 40,000 poll. So for every 100 Foyle first preference votes they got 20.
This dramatic upset visited on Foyle’s two political stars – both not meeting the first count quota – is due to their parties chronic under performance in bringing properly paid new jobs to Foyle. And unless Derry too sees assembly ministers opening new inward investment plants this 8,000 may double or treble in future elections. We too want our ‘helping’ of well paid inward investment jobs. We are not ivy clad up here. We know of the job sectors now enjoying massive growth in and around 30 miles of Belfast. We too for instance want inward investment in the globally expanding aircraft equipment manufacturing sector (Aerospace).
Twenty nine aerospace companies already employs thousands in and around Belfast. For example Thompson Aero Portadown employs 250 manufacturing aircraft seating. Survite Belfast employs 250 making sea survival equipment for aircraft. And BE Aerospace Kilkeel manufactures oxygen relief systems for aircraft employing 250-plus. So far Derry has only one aerospace company – Maydown Precision Engineering. Life science manufacturing is another mega success story east of the Bann.
According to invest NI life science employs 7,500. With many of these jobs being inward investment from US and Japan. But Derry has no life science manufacturing jobs.
Interestingly both these expanding sectors pay miles above MW. All the successful Foyle candidates will now realise – thanks to McCann and the courageous Dr Anne – that Derry folk refuse to stand on the side walk and watch the parade of new well-paid jobs pass by. We too want our ‘helping’.
TOM BRADLEY
Derry city
Trust no-one but ourselves
With so much revealed about clandestine cover-ups by political, media and religious authorities, the latest revealing Edward Heath’s knowledge of the UVF involvement in the McGurk’s Bar bombing, has made me conclude that we should trust no-one but ourselves.
Ulster has been a playground for so many vested interests, both ethnic and economic, that we have remained eternally supine. The fact that there are roadworks after roadworks across Northern Ireland at a time when the Health Service is badly underfunded proves that the assembly doesn’t have its priorities right.
Our society had free-fallen into decadence and military empire building, just like Ancient Rome, and the Lord’s indictment of the Pharisees when “These people worship me (God) with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me.” (Mark 7:6) rings all the more true now.
The longer we cling to our habitual ways of dependence on others, the more we are sucked into the abyss.
DESMOND DEVLIN
Magherafelt, Co Derry
Chivalry not in the UUP’s vocabulary
It is a measure of how fatuous the UUP Party has become when their doughty ‘let battle begin,’ leader Mike Nesbitt can only welcome the appointment of Clare Sugden as Justice Minister with some indecorous comment. How miserably imbecile and objectless has the UUP become over the past few years. Their leader has faith in nothing but expediency since receiving a vote of no confidence from the Ulster people, and dares to threaten this innovation in a fit of pique.
No doubt as self-appointed leader of the so-called Opposition, he will have many opportunities to display the crassness directed at Ms Sugden. In the meantime we can only assume that chivalry is a word with which the UUP are not familiar.
WILSON BURGESS
Derry City
