Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-11-13-Speech-4-349-000"
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"en.20141113.23.4-349-000"2
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"Mr President, a couple of weeks ago the President of Parliament, Martin Schulz, said that the Northern Ireland Peace Process was a great European achievement. Well, fine, whatever floats your boat, Martin. It is obviously an achievement that there should be peace. No one would want to go back to the violence that scarred a whole generation. I personally have always felt that I have a bit of a stake in power-sharing, being one side Ulster Catholic and on the other Scots Presbyterian.
There is, though, a democratic price that we should acknowledge. We have created a system where almost all the parties are almost always in power. They are scrabbling to find public sector sinecures for their supporters, and in consequence, although we have just heard about these supposed cuts, the amount of GDP in Northern Ireland spent by the state is 71%. It is more than it was in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
We all know, being democratic politicians, that the thing that keeps you on your toes is an opposition, a prospective future government. Until we can move to a full democratisation, with an opposition involved in the Stormont Assembly, we cannot call it a properly democratic state."@en1
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