NI Conservatives’ spokesman, Trevor Ringland, has welcomed some of the ideas in Alliance’s latest document about integration, but he said that the party had missed its best opportunities to help deliver a shared future.
“We certainly need a plan to combat division, as our greatest political priority”, Trevor emphasised. “However Alliance has to shoulder a lot of the blame for failing to deliver a viable strategy on a shared future. The party had leverage during the negotiations to devolve policing and justice, which it could have used to demand much more concrete progress on a CSI strategy and that key aspects of the 2005 Shared Future document were maintained.”
“Likewise, when the Union flag dispute arose at Belfast City Hall, Alliance could have insisted that it would not vote for designated days until the policy was implemented across all councils in Northern Ireland. Instead it went ahead, without any wider agreement.”
“Any meaningful CSI strategy must contain targets for things like sharing schools, integrating housing and reducing duplication of services. Alliance has said some things I would agree with, but they have consistently failed to deliver their key objective of implementing a strategy to bring about a shared future. In the process they, together with the other executive parties, have let the people of Northern Ireland down and the sooner they all face up to that, the better for all of us.”