Tired of putting the boot into Jezza Corbyn, Bozza Johnson, Jo Swinson, Nigel F****e and other ghastly figures in GB politics? Welcome to Northern Ireland, where the DUP is still sulking on public money while not attending the NI Assembly – and thus preventing others from doing so. The UK and Irish governments pointed the finger at them for the failure of yesterday’s ‘talks’ on, er, doing their bloody job. Who else indulges in ‘talks’ on whether or not to bother turning up at your place of work?
The NI Assembly has been inactive for three years and this po-faced shower still don’t get that the whole point of democratic institutions is that meet in them with people whose views are different to their own and come to compromise arrangements for the good of the population and its public service infrastructure.
There was a strike by nurses yesterday in NI, backed by all four nursing unions – for the first time in the RCN’s history. Health is a devolved matter in NI. The DUP are trousering cash and not turning up for work – which means that no other party can turn up for work – while the NI health service collapses. Truly, these people are a disgrace.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-50862299
It’s a year on from ‘Smash the System’ and it still needs smashed. I’ve lost track of how many millions are being wasted on MLA pay. My experience of crunching the (publicly available) numbers last year a couple of times is that the true figure is generally a couple of million more than the government admits to the Westminster NI Affairs Committee at any point in time.
Tiggerlion says
Couldn’t all the other party members of the assembly show up and conduct business without them?
Colin H says
If only…. Sadly, the way the NI Assembly is constructed, the DUP and Sinn Fein have to be there. If anyone else went off in a huff, it wouldn’t matter – but nobody else WOULD go off in a huff. You have to understand, Tiggs, that the DUP are the death of hope. They are pure poison. The also encompass huge hypocrisy – try Googling DUP superinjunctions.
Tiggerlion says
I am aware of the super injunctions and much of their misbehaviour. They make Sinn Fein appear honest and principled.
Colin H says
With SF, they are what they appear – a load of former terrorists. There’s no mystery there. With the DUP, they’re mired in moral hypocrisy and corruption. They front up this tee-total, god-fearing, anti-gay schtick and it seems clear that a significant number of them are anything but. Similarly, all this stuff protesting about not wanting a few Irish Sea customs checks because it makes NI different to the rest of the UK – when the DUP has for years propped up a system in NI whereby it is different from England/Scotland in any number of other ways that suit the DUP, like the (only very recently repealed by Westminster in a deft move by GB parliamentarians for the greater good given the NI Assembly was inactive) draconian abortion laws (not even in rape cases). Sickening. Honestly, in any other part of the UK they’d have been laughed out of the village decades ago.
retropath2 says
Now several years into post Good Friday Agreement, can we not call Sinn Fein zealots?
Salty says
I was so happy when Pengelly got voted out in South Belfast, within a day she’d been co-opted into the MLA position vacated by Lockhart. Still clinging to the hope that Paisley gets collared by the Parliamentary standards over the “Maldives Jaunt”.
As Colin says they are the antidote of hope – when you see the humourless Poots fronting up to the media following another day of stonewalling you know the future looks bleak.
Colin H says
Poots – the very dictionary definition of ‘joyless’. Ebenezer Scrooge would have proclaimed, ‘Christ, what the hell is wrong with that man?’ On a tangent, I performed (a couple of instrumental blues) at an open mic event in Belfast a few weeks back only to be told afterwards that an MLA too extreme even for the DUP (an individual who has had the whip removed – a Creationist an anti-LGBT hanger/flogger) was in the audience. Sure enough, when I looked at a couple of photos I’d taken of friends at my table, there he was, glowering in the middle distance… To think that the only known DUP foray into the land of popular culture took place at an open-mic where I was performing modal blues… The people at my table hadn’t mentioned it before my spot lest I give the fellow a public kicking. I don’t think I would have. You have to rise above it otherwise you become them. Scary thought.