Mark Durkan snaps my home
So a full week after Derry MP Mark Durkan made his address to the British-Irish Association in Oxford, Durkan has set the record straight in full print. Needless to say, it happened first in the pages of Friday’s Derry Journal and can be read here. A similar, shorter article appears in Saturday’s Irish News [sorry, got no link to that].
As might have been expected, Durkan is adamantly asserting that he never called for an end to power-sharing in the North. He takes the line of accusing Sinn Fein of telling lies. Although it’s sometimes hard to know when SF are telling lies and when they simply don’t know what they’re talking about. He also knocks on the head any notion that the DUP have that the SDLP will support voluntary coalition. But as NBNW said earlier in the week, that was clear from the speech.
To be fair to Durkan, he made similar points on Radio Foyle early in the week. A statement on the SDLP website posted a week ago points out that d’Hondt should remain nothwithstanding any designation reform. The following day, sunday, a statement was posted calling for devolution of policing and justice on the basis of inclusive power-sharing. But readers will see that these didn’t address the misrepresenting on the head – and didn’t get enough attention to undo the unfolding damage. SDLP supporters will understandably ask why it took a week for the forceful media rebuttal they heard on the radio to appear in print.
To be fair, it was a busy week. Listeners to Paul McFadden on thursday morning [the Radio Foyle version of Steven Nolan] will have heard Durkan go head-to-head with Derry’s heavy hitter for over half an hour on the energy crisis. Durkan appeared to be on his mobile – the call dropped at one stage – and on his way to chair the Enterprise committee meeting in Stormont to grill the Energy regulator on the electicity and gas hikes.
But he put in a great performance – his grasp of the issues was all the more highlighted when some SF stooge texted in with a question about Martina Anderson’s Latin Solution [getting supposedly cheap oil from Venezuela]. Compared to Durkan’s overview, the Latin oil plan – if it ever happened – really seems like putting an elastoplast on open heart surgery gone wrong. About as irrelevant as Caitriona Ruane – well almost.
But didn’t we rush over something? NBNW has spoken to some SDLP canvassers from the North West who were canvassing down in Enniskillen during the week. They said that not one person they had spoken to on the doorsteps had raised Durkan’s designation/powersharing problem. Granted, they couldn’t say that it wasn’t raised with any SDLP people down there in this week of the by-election, but it does say something. And nobody outside politics/media circles in the NW were talking power-sharing either.
B’fheidir go bhfuil fadhb airithe ag Durkan. Even politically astute nationalists – and others – think that power-sharing is having ‘Taigs and Prods’ sitting together in government. But in Durkan’s eyes, power-sharing means automatic entitlement to Ministries based on your vote share. Suffice to point out that until the politically interested public absorb that there is a difference, the SDLP have a problem in using arguments like in the Journal.
The regular five eighths, Pat and Ann Doherty [as we say in the NW!] are worried about the cost of living and not the intricacies of d’Hondt. This is both a potential strength and weakness for Durkan and the SDLP. They need to go on all out attack in coming weeks both on the Executive’s shambolic inertia and on the policing and justice question.
Letting the papers misreport for too long is one thing, letting the Shinners hold up Executive action on bread and butter issues while constitutionally they hand over yet more power to the DUP would be quite another.
