Member's statement: Garvaghy Road: Mr Jim Allister MP
Member's statement by Ms Emma Sheerin on .
- MLA
- Ms Emma Sheerin
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 12 October 2026
- Type
- Member's statement
- Business
- Members' Statements
- Heading
- Garvaghy Road: Mr Jim Allister MP
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5785828
Read the official Assembly record
Text
We have heard some awful, hurtful and hateful rhetoric in recent weeks. I condemn all of that, and I condemn any abuse levelled at any politician or person regardless of their background or persuasion. With that in mind, I want to speak specifically this afternoon about comments made over the weekend by the North Antrim MP and leader of the TUV, Jim Allister, when he said that, a fortnight ago, the Garvaghy Road should have been "sanitised"; "sanitised" is the word that he used. I urge everyone to think about what that means. The implication, of course, is that the people of the Garvaghy Road are dirty. That is a strategy and a mindset that was employed by the apartheid regime in South Africa. Fascist leaders in Europe in the 1940s used that same strategy. When you consider a people or a community to be subhuman or dirty, you have licence to abuse them. That strategy was employed by the British when they colonised India and when they colonised Ireland. That allowed for the genocide that occurred here and for the denial of rights to nationalists in the North. Ultimately, it allowed for nationalists to be beaten off the streets, targeted and murdered by the state. What Jim has done is to say the quiet part out loud. He thinks that the people of the Garvaghy Road should have been beaten off the streets by the PSNI. He thinks that the Orange state should still own the police, just as the RUC were owned and encouraged to drag people off the streets and beat them over the head with batons in days gone by. He wants us to go back to 1969, when the former leader and founding member of the DUP, Ian Paisley, told us that Catholics multiplied like vermin. I have a message for Jim Allister: the people of the Garvaghy Road are some of the proudest, most resilient and kindest people that I have ever had the privilege to know and stand alongside. The nationalist people of the North are not vermin. We are not dirty. We are not subhuman. We will not be dragged back. We know our rights, and we are not going to be beaten off the streets as in the days of yore. We are not going back: not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Sin é.
393 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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