The DUP will refuse to participate in two special Assembly subcommittees designed to help pave the way for a return to devolution by the deadline of November 24th, party leader the Rev Ian Paisley has told Northern Secretary Peter Hain.
The DUP rejection marks another hitch in the attempts by the British and Irish governments to persuade all the parties to work constructively together through the summer to create the potential for the reinstatement of Stormont in late November.
In recent weeks Mr Hain determined that the Northern parties should form three special sub-groups of the Assembly programme for government committee dealing with: policing and justice; changes to the institutions of the Belfast Agreement; and economic challenges facing Northern Ireland.
He proposed these sub-groups on the back of a plan of work that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British prime minister Tony Blair said the parties should carry out through the summer, when the two leaders held talks with the parties in late June.
The programme for government committee has agreed that a sub-group examining economic matters should be formed but yesterday Dr Paisley led a DUP delegation in a meeting with Mr Hain in Westminster to say he would not be part of the other two sub-groups. Dr Paisley complained that these sub-groups would operate on a majority-vote system rather than a unionist/nationalist consensus basis and therefore could disadvantage the DUP. "The creation of sub-groups, whose membership is unrepresentative and which operate under a voting system that is detrimental to the unionist interest, is completely unacceptable to us," he said after the meeting.
Dr Paisley said that if the parties went ahead and formed the sub-groups without the DUP the party would still consider the work and recommendations of these groups. "If other parties do not share our view on how to move forward and are determined to proceed with sub-groups, they can, of course, do so."
