Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil display "something of a double standard" by insisting Northern Irish enter government with Sinn Féin in the North while ruling out a coalition with the party in the Republic, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson has said.
The return of power sharing in Northern Ireland following a deal by Sinn Féin and the DUP to re-enter government in the north last month was backed by Fine Gael and welcomed by Fianna Fáil.
However, both parties have rejected the prospect of forming a coalition government with Sinn Féin in the south after the February 8th general election.
The stance taken by the political parties in the south has rankled with some in the North who feel pushed by politicians in Dublin into joining the devolved government at Stormont with their political rivals where they would refuse to do so themselves.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have ruled out entering coalition government with Sinn Féin over the party’s opposition to the non-jury Special Criminal Court, the influence of former senior IRA figures in Belfast over the party and its manifesto plans to increase taxes and spending.
“I can’t blame Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil for not wanting to share power with Sinn Féin. We don’t have that luxury,” Mr Donaldson told The Irish Times.
“If I was in their position, we would be doing the same thing: we would not want to share power in those circumstances.”
Different system
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has said that the situation is different in the North because of the requirement to have a power-sharing arrangement to ”ensure sustainable government”.
“Okay, our system is different,” said Mr Donaldson, “but it does grate a little that we have southern parties that recoil against the prospect of sharing power with Sinn Féin whilst insisting that in Northern Ireland we must share power with them.”
The latest Irish Times/Ipsos-MRBI opinion poll put support for Sinn Féin at 25 per cent, Fianna Fáil at 23 per cent and Fine Gael at 20 per cent, leaving a combination of two of those parties with the best chance of forming a stable coalition if those figures were repeated on polling day.
“We understand why those parties would not want to share power with Sinn Féin,” said the DUP’s Lagan Valley MP.
The DUP had “no choice” but to enter a mandatory coalition and share power with parties elected with sufficient seats to gain access to the Northern Ireland executive, he said.
He hoped that Northern Ireland’s system of government could “normalise” one day and move to the same “voluntary coalition arrangement“ that exists in Dublin.
Mr Donaldson welcomed the decision of Conor Murphy, Sinn Féin’s minister for finance in the North, to apologise to the family of Paul Quinn for linking him to criminality in the weeks after the south Armagh man was beaten to death by a gang in Co Monaghan in October 2007.
“Whilst Conor Murphy’s apology is welcome, we believe that if he has information that would help the police, either the Garda or the PSNI, in bringing to justice those responsible for this atrocious crime, then he should give that information to the police,” he said.
