At all times...
Well the peace process wouldn't be the peace process without some arguments about terminology. Today the Assembly and Executive Review Committee started a war of words which could be fairly fundamental, if it represents the collapse of the DUP Sinn Fein agreement over policing and justice back in July.
At that stage Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness co-authored a letter which included the sentence "We believe that your consideration should be based on a single department in which policing and justice powers would reside with a single Minister elected at all times from the Assembly in a way which would ensure cross-community support."
This sentence led to all the talk about Alliance taking the justice job. Since then, the SDLP have been hammering away at the line that this boils down to "no nationalist need apply". Today Alex Attwood scored a hit when he raised the matter in the committee,and Sinn Fein's Alec Maskey responded by saying that "at all times" did not mean the cross community vote should be permanent. Later Raymond McCartney argued that the sentence meant a future Justice Minister should "at all times" be elected "from the Assembly", rather than "at all times" by "cross community support".
We are in "eats, shoots and leaves" territory here. But the significance is that if the July agreement on a future Justice ministry falls apart, we are back to minus square one.
The row led to the Committee being adjourned until after Halloween, a move which puts in doubt the supposed mid November timetable adopted at a previous meeting. More importantly, we now have Sinn Fein accusing the DUP of reneging on the St Andrews Agreement and the DUP accusing Sinn Fein of reneging on the July letter. Not a great basis for moving forward.
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