Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the tabling of the debate albeit we should also be discussing the Bus Éireann strike. I send solidarity to the workers who will be here later today. On the impasse in the assembly in the North, I note that the Good Friday Agreement has created a period of relative peace and an important opportunity for working class and ordinary people to build a political alternative to the sectarian establishment parties which are incapable of resolving the divisions in Northern society.

However, the Good Friday Agreement, and all of the other agreements, including St. Andrews, Stormont House and Fresh Start are deeply flawed. They have institutionalised sectarian division and consistently failed to deal with contentious issues. The can has been well and truly kicked down the road, putting off inevitable crises to some time in the future. That time is now. While we have seen a hyper-sectarian election and while the DUP and Sinn Féin engage in sectarian competition, working-class people despair at the impact of their decisions over the last ten years.

They have been unable to come to agreement on legacy issues, minority language rights etc., yet they have had little difficulty in uniting on the implementation of austerity or denying women the right to choose and to have control over their own bodies. Sinn Féin and the DUP are on the same side when it comes to denying women access to abortion. I would like to put it on the record that, in the days before International Women’s Day and following it, the PSNI raided several addresses in Belfast in search of abortion pills. These pills are administered by doctors worldwide and contain drugs listed on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. No pills were found but activists’ phones, laptops and bank statements were seized. Northern Ireland has the most draconian criminal penalties for abortion of any region in Europe. A woman having an unlawful abortion may be sentenced to life imprisonment on the basis of legislation dating from 1861. The raids occurred as the latest episode of a targeted effort, on behalf of the establishment, to send a message to activists and women seeking abortions, “You do not decide your reproductive fate. We do.” This intimidation must be condemned and resisted by trade unionists and all who stand for basic human rights. None of the main parties in the North support a woman’s right to choose. There is no sign of any repeal movement by any of the political parties. The establishment is aware of a rising resentment among young women in particular, who are increasingly unwilling to tolerate criminalisation and backward legislation and who are joining a movement to push through progressive abortion reform.

The result of the austerity implemented by Sinn Féin and the DUP and their failure to agree a budget has exacerbated the crisis in public and social services. Communities across the North face losing their local doctor's surgery in the next few years. The problem is severe in the Portadown area but Fermanagh has been identified by the British Medical Association as being the most heavily hit of any part of the UK, with only five of the 18 practices currently operational likely to survive two years. This will mean patients will face extremely long waits and will be obliged to travel many miles to see a doctor. There is a belief among medical professionals that this crisis has been engineered as a way of delivering short-term cost reductions. Primary care services receive only 6% of health expenditure in Northern Ireland compared with more than 10% in England. Ministers with responsibility for health in the Assembly from both the DUP and Sinn Fein have failed to address this situation.

The Education Authority has threatened to impose charges of between £50 and £200 per child for transport to school. The imposition of charges from September 2017 would devastate low-income households. It is another regressive stealth tax on working-class families. Meanwhile, 44 staff members in the Intensive Family Support Service in Belfast were put on protective notice by the publicly-funded charity group Extern as a result of the failure of the DUP and Sinn Féin to agree a budget. Nearly 2,000 children depend on that service.

So-called welfare reform is now being implemented in the North. Despite a period of grandstanding by Sinn Féin, it and the DUP handed the power to implement welfare cuts back to the Tory government in Westminster, in effect damning ordinary people to facing harsh attacks. Claims that they had no choice or other attempts to cleanse themselves of responsibility for this measure do not wash. The Stormont politicians are capable of borrowing £700 million to destroy 20,000 jobs in the public sector. They plan to hand a huge tax cut to the super-rich by slashing corporation tax, which will result in a future annual cut of £300 million a year in public expenditure. Yet they plead poverty when it comes to protecting welfare and other vital services on which working-class people rely on. The politicians laud the mitigations they secured to soften to impact of welfare reform but there is no guarantee these will continue beyond 2020. The hated bedroom tax will immediately be applied to all new claimants with a spare room. This year, low-paid families will lose up to £2,000 as a result of benefit changes. These attacks can and should be resisted by communities and the trade union movement.

The peace process did not come about because of the supposed vision of Northern Irish politicians or the intervention of US Presidents, British Prime Ministers or Irish Taoisigh, for that matter. The peace process was created by the ordinary people who took to the streets over many years in their tens of thousands to force the republican and loyalist paramilitaries to stop sectarian killings and to call ceasefires. The peace process is not owned by the sectarian politicians. It is owned by ordinary people. It is time for working-class people to take control back from the failed Stormont parties. The current crisis once again shows there is a compelling need for a genuine anti-sectarian working-class party in Northern Ireland that can unite Protestant and Catholic people in opposition to Stormont’s austerity and that can lead mass campaigns to win a woman’s right to choose and for marriage equality and other social progress. If we are to avoid the mistakes of the past and to prevent another generation being dragged into the despair of open sectarian conflict, then trade unionists, socialists and community activists need to unite so that future elections are not dominated by the sectarian struggle between the DUP and Sinn Féin for the role of First Minister, but instead we can have a different story, one dominated by a genuine coming together of a divided society behind a new political force committed to building a better future for all.

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