Loyalist paramilitaries mostly now involved in organised crime should not be pandered to by the Irish and British governments, the Alliance Party leader has said.
Every member of the Northern Ireland Assembly should have the same voice, Naomi Long also told her party’s annual conference, rather than the existing situation where Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party can prevent the Assembly from meeting.
Under an Alliance proposal, any party that chose not to go into government would automatically go into Opposition, but “unlike with the current veto system, no one party could exclude everyone from the Executive and Assembly”, Ms Long, the Northern Ireland Minister for Justice, told delegates in Belfast.
Alliance has also proposed that Stormont votes should move from the system of parallel consent to a weighted majority voting to measure cross-community consent where “everyone’s vote would finally be equal – no party or designation would be more equal than any other”.
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The decision of the Irish and British governments to examine the merits of appointing a representative to deal directly with loyalist paramilitaries in a bid to ease them out of existence is sharply opposed by the Alliance Party.
“It would certainly be an immeasurably better use of their time and resources than pandering to paramilitaries and organised crime gangs, while offering them a legitimacy they don’t deserve, at the expense of the people they criminally coerce and exploit for their own gain,” Ms Long said
Alliance deputy leader Eóin Tennyson described the decision by Dublin and London as disgraceful. “I have yet to hear articulated a single compelling barrier to disbandment of these organisations, other than their commitment to continue lining their own pockets,” he said.
“Put yourself in the shoes of the small business owner forced to pay protection money, the young mother exploited through loan-sharking, the child sent out to deal drugs. Appointing an interlocutor is not only a slap in the face to them, but undermines the rule of law.”
Meanwhile, Ms Long has claimed the DUP was now acting as “fan boys” for US president Donald Trump in a fashion that was “both embarrassing and dangerous”.
“We all know the DUP have a history of making terrible political choices, so their fan-boying for Trump has come as no surprise. There is simply no issue they can’t manage to be on the wrong side of,” she said
Recently, DUP leader Gavin Robinson was guilty, she said, of “parroting the language of wokery, like some kind of Temu Trump” when he said that 50/50 recruitment of Catholics and Protestants to the Police Service of Northern Ireland was “off the table”.
In her speech, Ms Long was sharply critical of DUP MP Sammy Wilson, whom she dubbed “Poundland Putin”, claiming he was now “peddling the Kremlin’s lines on the war in Ukraine”.
The Alliance Party, along with Sinn Féin, has decided not to go to the White House in Washington DC for this year’s St Patrick’s Day visit.
“I respect the right of US citizens to elect whomever they wish as president. I also respect the office of president,” Ms Long told the conference. “However, I do not and will make no pretence of respecting the current office-holder,”
