The Irish unity campaign is nothing more than “constitutional vandalism” that threatens to rip apart the Belfast Agreement that has given Northern Ireland its most peaceful decades, Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader Jon Burrows has said.
Burrows again challenged Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O’Neill to a head-to-head debate on the unity question, saying myths must be confronted “with cold, hard facts”.
He told his party’s annual conference in Belfast that the UUP will not be “overruled by Sinn Féin’s propaganda” and nor will it give the likes of O’Neill “a free ride with your fantasy Border poll politics”.
Burrows said O’Neill insists that she wants to create a new state, but Sinn Féin Ministers in the Stormont Executive “can’t fix the potholes in the roads in this one”.
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Sinn Féin endlessly declares that a Border poll is “just around the corner, or the next bend”, he said, but the UUP will ensure that it does not happen by “evangelising” for the United Kingdom in every part of Northern Ireland.
Burrows was also highly critical of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), despite recent and repeated calls by its leader Gavin Robinson for unity among unionist parties.
“This party is the party of the union. But we have to be honest when we reflect about unionism, and it has made some mistakes. I don’t think unionism is stronger than it was 20 years ago,” he said.
“Morale is not higher, it doesn’t get more votes, it doesn’t have more seats. Volume has been confused with strategy. Tactics with strategy,” said Burrows, insisting that unionism must be “honest about the mistakes that have been made”.
The DUP’s mistakes date back to the negotiation of the St Andrew’s Agreement in 2006, he added, when it accepted that the Stormont Assembly would be cut from 108 to 90 seats, which led to the loss of 16 unionist seats, but just one for Sinn Féin.
“[Sinn Féin] gained a huge amount of power. Unionists have been left unable to pass any vote by themselves in Stormont. The reason we have a Sinn Féin First Minister is again because of changes made then,” he said.
“Decision-making has been short-term and self-interested instead of thinking for the long term and the best interests of Northern Ireland. The Brexit negotiations were botched.”
Burrows said “collapsing Stormont achieved nothing” and doing so again would compound those errors. “Yet that is the central policy of one of our unionist rivals.”
He said collapsing the institutions again would be one of the most destructive things unionists could do and it would be a “gift-wrapped” present for Sinn Féin, “hand all power to London” and offer Dublin a greater say in Northern Ireland’s affairs.
“We could shout and scream about that, but we would have to deal with it.”
A former Police Service of Northern Ireland officer, Burrows was scathing about the level of co-operation being offered by the Irish Government to the Omagh bomb inquiry and Northern Ireland’s legacy commission.
“The Irish State continues to withhold the truth. Sadly, that rekindles a lot of memories in Northern Ireland. The State that refused to extradite 97 per cent of requests of people who murdered our citizens is still not candidly engaging with the past.”
