PRESS STATEMENT – PRESS STATEMENT – PRESS STATEMENT

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SDLP MLA BURNS: OFMDFM MUST SHOW LEADERSHIP ON FLAGS AND EMBLEMS
 

SDLP South Antrim MLA Thomas Burns has called upon the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister to show some real leadership on a shared future and shared public space by grasping the nettles of flags and emblems.

He said: “OFMDFM was carefully designed under the Good Friday Agreement to embody power-sharing and lead and promote partnership in public life. The two office-holders should be tackling division and showing the way forward, but they are not. Instead, they are avoiding and evading and kicking all the problems down the road ahead of them. They are doing nothing for fear of upsetting their own back-benchers and backwoodsmen.

“We can’t go on forever with town hall stand-offs and tit-for-tat Assembly motions appealing to sectarian solidarity. Our two leading ministers are being paid good money to provide joint leadership in pursuit of a shared future and it is time they got together and did their job.

“They should start by grasping the nettle of flags and emblems and have the guts to face down their own hardliners by promoting new regulations for the flying of flags from public buildings. The necessary principle for a new flags regime can be found in the Good Friday Agreement: “just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos and aspirations of both communities”.

It should also be the key for settling all disputes about shared space and a shared future.

“Seven years ago the SDLP set out the options for just and equal treatment on flags; find a new, agreed flag; fly no flags; or fly two flags, Union and Tricolour. We got no movement under the Direct Rulers, but we must now demand that our First and Deputy First Minister do the job they were elected to do.

“Steps should be taken to repeal the Flags (NI) Order, 2000, and associated Regulations, which oblige the flying of the Union Flag over departments on designated days, and provisions of the Criminal Justice (NI) Act, 2000, which oblige the flying of the Union Flag over courthouses. They are clearly incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement.”
 

ENDS