Bill Manwaring, spokesperson for the NI Conservatives, has described the Alliance Party’s decision to pull out of ‘shared future’ talks as “an astonishing admission of defeat”.
“Could there be a more potent symbol of just how powerless Alliance is within this Executive and just how spectacularly the party has failed to deliver on ‘shared future’?” Bill asked. “Let’s remember that the Programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration (CSI) was the flimsy pretext which persuaded David Ford to join carve-up government and become minister for justice in the first place. “
“Now he has effectively admitted that the executive’s strategy, which Alliance attempted to sell to voters as an achievement, contains very little cohesion or sharing and is a gaping hole when it comes to integration. Surely this calls into question his remaining as justice minister?”
“This cuts to the very heart of what is wrong with the government at Stormont. Since 2007 there has been no meaningful progress toward creating a shared future. Indeed the executive’s supposed strategy for sharing simply perpetuates more division. At the same time there is no effective opposition to DUP / Sinn Féin, with parties like Alliance co-opted to prop up the carve-up.”
“When the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, visited the Assembly back in 2008, he pointed out that until “cultural barriers” between communities in Northern Ireland come down the “floodgates” of our economy will remain closed. Rather than vague platitudes, we need a CSI strategy which contains real targets, dates and times for delivery on shared housing, integrated education and cutting the financial costs of division: for the sake of our economy, as well as our society.”
“At the last set of elections the Alliance Party claimed it was delivering on shared future from within the executive. That fallacy has been exposed by David Ford’s decision to walk away from talks on CSI. The truth is that division is unlikely ever to be addressed by carve-up government. It’s up to politicians from all parties, who want to see an end to segregation, to start building an opposition and holding the executive to account for its failure to build a shared future for Northern Ireland”.