Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As a Thirty-two county party, People Before Profit welcomes the fact that there will be an election in Northern Ireland. We do not regret the fall of this Executive and we think this election offers an historic opportunity for the people of Northern Ireland to punish the political establishment there and the institutions of Stormont for what our comrades in Northern Ireland are describing as the endemic corruption of Stormont and the total bankruptcy of those institutions which the renewable heat incentive, RHI, scheme has exposed in the starkest light. It is worth saying that this is only the latest and largest in a succession of scandals such as the NAMA scandal, the Red Sky scandal and the scandal around the social investment fund, to name a few.

I was and am somewhat bemused by some of the debate in this House today, including the exchanges between the Taoiseach and Deputy Adams and some of the other contributions we heard. While there are lingering issues relating to equality that need to be seriously addressed, what screams out about the scandal around RHI is the rotten corruption at the heart of the political institutions in Northern Ireland. The scale of it is staggering. In respect of ordinary working people, regardless of whether they are Catholic or Protestant, Unionist or Nationalist or orange or green, as we always seem to wish to categorise them, the institutions of Stormont have institutionalised those sectarian divisions. What emerges from RHI is a corrupt elite that has effectively robbed the people of Northern Ireland of nearly £500 million - the figure is considerably more in euro - in a rotten scandal.

I am proud that People Before Profit was the first, bar none, in the Northern Assembly to call for Arlene Foster not to step aside, not to have negotiations, but to resign because whatever comes out of any investigation that finally happens, she should be sacked for at the very least gross incompetence and more likely than not much more than that.

Everything about this suggests corruption at an extraordinary level. We can contrast the hand-wringing and delay in calling an election and calling for Arlene Foster to resign when we are talking about £500 million burnt or planned to be burnt by an elite who are in the know with what was agreed by both the DUP and Sinn Féin in terms of the Stormont House Agreement, with 20,000 public sector jobs to go, plans to sell off state assets and plans to cut corporation tax. It is worth saying that the amount of moneys involved in RHI are about the same as the savings planned from axing 20,000 public sector jobs in the Stormont House Agreement which both the DUP and Sinn Féin supported as did parties down in the South supported in an austerity programme remarkably similar, indeed almost exactly the same, as the rotten austerity programme that was inflicted on working people down here.

We absolutely welcome this election and the fall of the Executive. It represents an historic opportunity for a different type of politics to emerge, to challenge the institutions, to challenge the failed orange and green politics and to put class issues and the economic and social issues affecting working people at the heart of Northern Ireland politics in a way that can break through the rotten sectarianism and offer a genuine alternative to working people.

There is one practical thing we should all be calling for right now and not after the election. We should demand that all the beneficiaries of the RHI scheme should be named now. We want to see their names and see all the documentation now so that the people, not in some inside so-called independent investigation carried out by Stormont, as has been proposed, but in a fully public inquiry which involves the publication of all documents so that people of the North can make the decision in the context of the election as to who they believe is responsible for the scandal of RHI and who benefited.

We know some of the people who have already benefited and they are certainly not ordinary Catholic or Protest working people. Viscount Brookeborough, one of the very richest people in the North, was one of the major beneficiaries and a whole network of patronage. It really has exposed the reality of modern-day Unionism that seems to have operated through a network of rotten patronage that did not benefit ordinary Protestant working people, but benefited an elite around the DUP.

I see Deputy McDonald nodding absolutely. We should not shilly-shally around; Arlene Foster should go. The problem is that with the way the institutions have been set up in the North, there is a sort of desire to keep these institutions going rather than challenge the rotten set-up that has been institutionalised by the Stormont Assembly and which essentially creates the conditions for this kind of corruption.

As a 32-county party, we do not need an invitation to go to the North; we will be up there. Buses have been booked to go up and canvass in the North. This will be the biggest electoral intervention by People Before Profit ever in the Northern elections. We hope to win a second seat in West Belfast and hold our seat in Derry, and run in a number of new constituencies. I urge people here who want to see a genuine challenge to the failed sectarian politics of the North to support us in that project to give left wing politics and opposition to corruption and failed austerity policies a chance in the forthcoming election.

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