Ballymoney Councillor John Finlay has said that devolution in Northern Ireland is working for Unionists thanks to the efforts of the DUP.
Speaking out after an article by Queens University academic Professor Rick Wilford in the Irish News, John Finlay said:
"Don’t take it from me, but from an expert. Professor Rick Wilford, a respected politics don at Queens, said that the provision stopping ministers going on solo runs "has clearly worked".
Professor Wilford said this change of circumstances was reflected in the prevention of Education Minister Caitriona Ruane pushing ahead with her proposals to end academic selection.
In his article Professor Wilford said:
"what she can’t do, as it were, is to make policy or legislation without the agreement of other executive members."
He concluded:
"In that respect you could say from the unionist point of view it is working, from a nationalist point of view it ain’t working"
These comments from a highly respected academic are a demonstration of what the DUP has achieved. The DUP have fundamentally changed the way in which government operates here; a fact acknowledged not only by Professor Wilford, but also by Mr. Justice Morgan who found that the Belfast Agreement system of devolution no longer operates in Northern Ireland.
Ministers are held to account, unlike under the Belfast Agreement, negotiated by the UUP. Academics, high court judges and even members of opposition parties are slowly but surely having to come to terms with the scale and magnitude of the DUP’s success in political negotiations" the DUP Councillor said.
