McNarry attacks deserve UUP censure

One of Reg Empey’s aims in overseeing a restructuring of the UUP, is to establish some semblance of coherence and discipline within the party. It is therefore an acute embarrassment that after a successful party conference, a senior party representative has seen fit to attack Margaret Ritchie over her handling of the CTI affair.

David McNarry’s intemperance has been channelled in other unfortunate directions only a short while ago and it seems there is a pointed determination by this MLA (who views himself as leadership material) to veer off the party line.

One of the party’s strengths has long been its capacity to encompass a plurality of opinions and this is certainly an admirable and democratic tradition. Increasingly however, there has been a realisation that there must be some form of discipline in order to present before the electorate, something resembling a coherent message.

The fact that Mr McNarry consistently expresses opinions which are not in keeping with the type of constructive unionism the party wishes to advance, in conjunction with the reality that he is speaking for a small proportion of his fellow party members, should galvanise the party leadership to take action against him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more