Northern Ireland Conservatives’ chairman, Irwin Armstrong, has said that the current executive at Stormont “is not committed to a shared future” and he called its draft strategy for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration (CSI), “a hollow charade”.
“Last year Sinn Féin and the DUP produced this pathetic document as a consequence of the so-called Hillsborough Agreement. It may have provided the Alliance Party with a comfort blanket and persuaded David Ford to take the justice minister’s post, but everyone else could see that it was a box ticking exercise rather than a serious attempt to advance a shared future. Now it emerges that the public made its view clear by savaging the document in a public consultation. No wonder that the responses have been kept under wraps for the past year.”
“The DUP and Sinn Féin’s CSI strategy practically ignored key issues like shared schools and housing, which weren’t even included in its ‘key aims’, it failed to put a monetary value on division, still less set targets for combating it, and it didn’t even attempt to define sectarianism or racism.”
“This document has little to say about sharing and it’s a gaping hole where it comes to integration – but that’s hardly surprising when one considers its authors. Quite simply, the DUP and Sinn Féin are not interested in an integrated society, because their fortunes are tied to a ‘shared out future, rather than a shared future’, to paraphrase David Cameron.”
“It says it all that we’re still waiting for a workable integration strategy, after more than 4 years of the Sinn Féin / DUP carve-up. Their document was late, it’s not being advanced with any urgency and its contents are, in any case, completely inadequate. The two parties ought to be ashamed of their efforts and Alliance ought to be embarrassed that this hollow charade of a strategy was the fig-leaf which allowed it to join the executive.”
“The Northern Ireland Conservatives want a policy advancing One Northern Ireland, One Community, One Future politics, which emphasises what the people of Northern Ireland have in common and doesn’t magnify our differences. Only when our politicians lead from the front can we ever hope to move away from the past and, at the moment, Stormont falls far short in that regard.”