Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The majority of the people in the North of Ireland voted for the Good Friday Agreement. Most polls show that a majority of people of the North support the protocol or could live with the protocol. The DUP is a minority party and unionism is now a minority political view in the North. I believe the DUP has put itself in a strategic cul-de-sac at the moment. At every juncture of Brexit, it has misstepped. It now finds itself in the past ten days pulling down Stormont, playing its trump card, which is its last card. The British response yesterday was just to say it would implement the Irish language Act. I do not believe the Irish language Act should be politicised in anyway in this entire process. It was interesting that in a debate in Westminster yesterday, Ian Paisley Jnr. basically said the Tories had no real interest in the North. He said they were an English nationalist party, more interested in the red wall than in the border on the Irish Sea. The DUP has created this situation.

I welcome that the Taoiseach said that no party should pull down Stormont on the basis of its own political agenda. I fully agree with that. If we allow Stormont to be pulled down by one single party in the future, is that not a recipe for dysfunction? It is actually undemocratic because there is a majority in favour of the Irish language Act in Stormont. There is a majority in favour of the protocol in Stormont. Do we not now need Stormont to be reformed? The rules of the institution itself need to move beyond where Stormont is at the moment. Even if there is an election in May, there is a serious likelihood that the DUP will not participate in the Executive. We cannot put ourselves into a two- or three-year hiatus when 44,000 people are on waiting lists for houses in the North, 250,000 people are in poverty and another 250,000 people are waiting for hospital beds for more than a year. Surely the Irish and British Governments now have a responsibility to rewrite the rules of Stormont.