Opinion

Mary Kelly: Yes, Jeffrey - enough really is enough

Hilariously standing in front of a poster proclaiming 'Let’s Get NI Moving Again', Paul Givan announced his resignation as First Minister, dragging Deputy Michelle O’Neill with him and collapsing the government that has already had a three-year gap in its mandate...

The DUP's latest approach to getting 'NI moving' has been to move itself out of the first minister's office. Picture by Mal McCann.
The DUP's latest approach to getting 'NI moving' has been to move itself out of the first minister's office. Picture by Mal McCann. The DUP's latest approach to getting 'NI moving' has been to move itself out of the first minister's office. Picture by Mal McCann.

FOR once I agree with Jeffrey. Enough is enough.

We’ve all had enough. Enough of a party so desperate to claw back the poll support it has squandered over its disastrous Brexit strategy that it brings down the Executive.

Enough of a party whose leader bleats about equality and respect, yet shows none of it to an electorate still living with a pandemic, a failing health service and a growing crisis in living standards.

Their naked electioneering using the excuse of the NI Protocol which has not had any major impact on the lives of the majority of its citizens is a cynical attempt at recovering lost ground, aided and abetted by the most dishonest and scandal-ridden British government ever to hold power.

Hilariously standing in front of a poster proclaiming 'Let’s Get NI Moving Again', Paul Givan announced his resignation as First Minister, dragging Deputy Michelle O’Neill with him and collapsing the government that has already had a three-year gap in its mandate.

Jeffrey has been banging on about bringing down Stormont for so long it was becoming an embarrassment. 

So why now, when talks are still going on and the EU has shown itself willing to make concessions? Is it so that the DUP can claim any concessions were due to their hard-balling?

Is it a strange coincidence that the DUP was conspicuously silent on calls for BoJo to resign? Was it just coincidence that when Liz Truss was over in Northern Ireland, she studiously avoided talking to anyone apart from the DUP and Orange Order?

Was it a coincidence too that Brandon Lewis was so sanguine about Edwin Poots’s shameless order to abandon border checks?  Little wonder that Robert Peston looked so disbelieving when Lewis said on his TV show that he didn’t know about the plan in advance.

Maybe pressing the nuclear button will help deflect attention from the internal ructions within the party whose familial relationships are now more akin to the Borgias.

Let’s not forget that Poots is claiming he was encouraged by Sir Jeffrey to contest South Down to leave a clear run for the DUP's latest leader in Lagan Valley, only for Donaldson to back Diane Forsythe instead.

If this is a party so willing to shaft its own people, should we be surprised they’re intent on shafting the country too?

So, no budget to help the health service. Thousands of people will miss out on a £200 fuel poverty payment in the middle of a sky high energy costs. No action on climate change. Victims of historical institutional abuse, who were due to get an official apology from the state, will be abandoned yet again.

Businesses waiting for Covid restrictions to be further lifted will also be disappointed. Little wonder that former DUP finance minister, Simon Hamilton, now chief executive of Belfast Chamber of Trade & Commerce, has warned that the last thing business needs is another period of instability.

And here’s the rub – every time Stormont collapses it becomes harder to convince people that it is worth saving.  Last time, when Sinn Féin pulled the plug over RHI, and a catalogue of other failures including implementing an Irish language act, equal marriage etc, many people on the nationalist side wondered if there was any real future in devolved government here with the DUP as partners.

It looks even harder to imagine now.

 Sir Jeffrey dreams up new amounts of money he says Northern Ireland is losing because of Brexit – £100,000 an hour, £2.5 million a day.  Maybe he should write it on the side of a bus.

Meanwhile we will continue making sure our biggest export is our young people, who are increasingly voting with their feet. Who could blame them?

Boris Johnson is under pressure over a number of party-related episodes, including being ambushed by a cake.
Boris Johnson is under pressure over a number of party-related episodes, including being ambushed by a cake. Boris Johnson is under pressure over a number of party-related episodes, including being ambushed by a cake.

“WHO is the Prime Minister?” used to be one of the questions doctors looking for signs of dementia would regularly ask my elderly mother. During the post-election kerfuffle between Labour and the Lib Dems after Tony Blair left office, she replied: “It was Gordon Brown when I left the house this morning, but it’s been a long day, so I don’t know if he still is.”

Anyone asking the same question now might wonder about the mental capacity of the Tory party who seem content to have a PM who has proved himself to be utterly unsuited to any kind of high office, let alone leading the country.

Some MPs are seeing sense, while advisors are heading for the doors.  But fangirl Nadine Dorries’s defence on TV bulletins, swaying from side to side, suggested she had just come back from a really raucous work event at Number 10.