Friday, October 19, 2007
“I do not see any reason whatsoever why we [the Executive] forced this issue…”
As mentioned earlier in the comments, Reg Empey told Talkback that he backed Margaret Ritchie, in that he was not prepared to pass the disputed minutes. He is critical of the late delivery of the minutes. The production of four (action?) points unseen before the meeting during an ad hoc discussion (ie, only added to the agenda at the last minute).
“Normally when someone has a problem with a minute it is deferred until they can produce evidence of inaccuracies or until they can talk to the First Minister or Deputy First Minister to sort it out. This happens regularly. There was no requirement for that minute to be passed yesterday, sometimes minutes are months behind. I was puzzled by that. I was asked if I would go down to my department and my home to see if I could find any notes that might help, and I said no I am not in the middle of a meeting like this. What’s the urgency of this?”
His recollection, he said, was closer to Ritchie’s than that of the minutes. He also confirmed that his understanding was that Ritchie had sought guidance, but had been told that it was her ministerial responsibility.
Mick Fealty @ 11:05 AM
“SF and the DUP made their way to the top of their respective tribal pile by being the loudest and brashest during the protracted negotiating period of the process, but now that politics has moved onto the nitty gritty, boring bread-and-butter stuff, the UUP and SDLP’s qualities such as consistency, logic and attention to detail, may become the more important attributes signalling a change in fortunes for the latter parties?” - Ian
It’s hard to guess that one. Northern society is split into two tribes, so the politics reflects those tribal divisions. PSF and the DUP came to prominence by pitting one tribe against the other. I don’t think you can ignore the power of that dynamic, hoping that opportunistic manipulators will forget the best trick in the book or that the society will cease to be divided into two tribes. The tribal division regarding The Irish Language Act, for example, indicates otherwise.Morality and principled behaviour from a political party will win votes, but will they win enough votes? PSF have been completely unprincipled on the issue of support for the UDA godfathers, but rather than condemn them for that, many of their supporters chose to either divert their eyes from it and onto the propriety of Her Majesty’s law (a delightful ultra pro-state juxtaposition for the old anti-state ‘republicans’) or they chose to praise PSF’s lack of principles as a virtue in politics. Either way, they recognise that they set the low standards by voting for PSF.
It might be that the public has been so corrupted by the process of being persuaded that mass-murderers are fit and proper people to hold elected office that they simply don’t have the required integrity to ‘purify’ their own politics at this late stage – which is probably why it isn’t necessarily a bad thing that you only have a puppet administration in the north, anyway.
I wonder if FF really know what they are letting themselves in for?
Posted by on Oct 20, 2007 @ 03:05 PM
