The DUP and loyalists should not be allowed to scatter Good Friday Agreement to the wind.
Agreement must be implemented in full - Free From Sectarian Haressment
08 August, 2022.
Micheál Martin, Leo Varadkar and the rag-tag group of meaningless individuals that constitute the incumbent Free State government should hang their heads in abject shame at the way in which they have allowed the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) to be scattered to the winds by the DUP and the British government.
As co-guarantors of the GFA, it is their responsibility to ensure the workings of all three strands of the agreement, and they have failed miserably in every way possible. The British government is the other co-guarantor of the GFA, but one can expect little from this shamed institution which is currently in turmoil, and which will continue to use the six counties for the benefit of its own selfish interests. The Irish government is so enmeshed in simply keeping itself in power that it has neither the time nor the interest in protecting the GFA and is allowing the DUP, a party which never supported the agreement, to use it for party political gain.
The complete lack of interest being shown by the government in the south should be of no surprise to nationalists in the north as previous governments have also shirked their responsibility in actively encouraging an all-Ireland approach on the island. Now, however, the government of the south is sitting idly by while the DUP uses the Agreement as a bargaining tool with the British government to get their own way over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The DUP are, in fact, holding the whole population of the six counties – unionist and nationalist – to ransom at a time of great economic poverty and in the midst of a lethal pandemic. They are being allowed to do this virtually unchallenged, and while families are struggling to put food on their tables and heat in their homes, the DUP are solely interested in their own narrow and selfish political aims. Unionist families, as well as nationalist families, are suffering now on a daily basis and the DUP appears not to care enough to put people before politics
in control
Every other party in the north, except the TUV of course, have called on the DUP to stop preventing the institutions from getting up and running, all the parties in Britain have called for the same as have the political parties in the south, along with the administration in the US.
All these calls have fallen on deaf ears. There is a way out of this impasse if the two co-guarantors are serious about protecting the agreement which is clearly being abused by Donaldson and company.
Simply introduce some changes to the rules as they did at St Andrews and get all three strands working as they are supposed to, and get the much-needed help out to the people who are currently struggling to make ends meet. That simple change would be to offer the DFM post to the next largest unionist party if the largest refuses to comply with the rules.
SEAN SEELEY
Craigavon, Co Armagh.
With many thanks to: The Irish News for the original publication.
Follow these links to find out more on this story: Cleric rejects Dee Stitt’s suggestion that UDA/UFF part of ‘Protestant culture’ as Jamie Bryson announces north Down loyalist is ‘a client’
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