Debate contribution: Election of Speaker and Deputy Speakers

Debate contribution by Mr Conor Murphy on 30 May 2022.

MLA

Mr Conor Murphy

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

30 May 2022

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Assembly Business

Heading

Election of Speaker and Deputy Speakers

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4177742

Read the official Assembly record

Text

The party opposite has said that it has a mandate for the position that it takes today. Like the Member who spoke previously, I never heard that party, over the course of the election, advocating that it would block a Speaker from being elected and the Assembly from being able to carry out its functions. I did not hear it say that it would continue to withdraw from the Executive for any lengthy period either.

I heard it talk about its five-point plan and how it was going to fix all the problems that we face. I do not believe that many of those Members, as far as I know, want to implement a mandate that, effectively, punishes people. The position that they have taken today is this: to punish the people whom we represent. It does not punish us — we can turn up here as long as we want and go off and do the work for our constituents — but it punishes the people whom we represent. Last week, there were welcome interventions from London on cost-of-living issues, but we now have to find a way to work in order to make sure that those supports get to people. My colleague Deirdre Hargey has to work with DWP in London in order to ensure that those payments, which will come through the benefits system, actually reach the people for whom they are intended: the people who are, and will be, most in need as the cost-of-living crisis bites deeper. I will work with the Treasury. It fully understood — I had dialogue with it last week — the position that we are in without an Executive. Its representatives know the legal advice that we have. They fully understood that we cannot take decisions on that £400 household support for people. I will, of course, work with my Department as best I can in order to try to ensure that that money goes to people. Let me be very clear, however. There is absolutely no certainty that we will be able to get the £400 per household out by the autumn. There is no certainty about that whatsoever, because the first hurdle that we have to overcome is the fact that we do not have an Executive in place to take the decision on it. Nonetheless, we will continue to work. The big issue is the £435 million — it is heading towards half a billion pounds — that we have sitting, which could go out of the door today as support for people here and now, but we cannot allocate it. We have to sit on it. The pot actually grows and has grown. Today and tomorrow, that money could be going out to households to assist those who are struggling to meet the challenges that they face with the cost of living and in trying to provide support for their families and others. The big issue is something that Mr Kingston got entirely wrong, and I will come to him in a minute. I am not sure who provides the script for the DUP, but its Members all try to spoof about this part of the issue in a kind of Trump-like fashion, which is that, if you tell a lie often enough, people believe it. The big issue is the Budget. People in the Chamber argued and clamoured for the past number of years for a multi-year Budget, and we finally got one. Part of the initiative with the draft Budget was to match the priority that we had all spoken about. All the parties declared, even before we came back into the Executive, that we were going to make Health a priority and that it would not really matter, in that sense, who took the position, because we would all support the Health Minister and would ensure that the funds were allocated. We then had a disagreement over the draft Budget, but, ironically, the DUP took the position of the draft Budget, which was to give an extra billion pounds to Health, and made it part of its election manifesto. There was no additional £400 million allocated to Health, however. The Health Minister is acting at risk, because that is the only way that he can try to get support to the people whom we, including your party, collectively promised to support in the time ahead. We are all acting outside and are trying to stretch the boundaries of our limited ministerial authority in this time in order to undo the damage that the DUP is causing on a daily basis. I will just say something about what Mr Givan said. He and others trotted out the usual thing. Mr Allister has gone, but he was not in the Chamber at the time, so I will at least give him some credit for that. When the Assembly went down over RHI, every single party in the Chamber asked the then First Minister to resign in order to allow an inquiry to be set up — every party, with the exception of the DUP. She refused to do so. Martin McGuinness had to get off his sickbed to come in and hand her a letter of resignation because that was the only way that we could take action to try to deal with that scandal and get an inquiry set up. We then went into an election. Within a matter of months, in February 2018, there was a deal on the table, which the DUP signed up to. Its Members sat in rooms upstairs with us and signed up to that deal. We said, "Let's go out and announce it"; they said, "Give us the weekend to get it fixed"; and, by Monday, its MP team had scuppered the deal by rallying round the Orange Order, the UDA and all the others in order to spook the horses. That is an absolute fact.

The reason —

The reason, Mr Acting Speaker

The reason —

I think that I should have an extra minute, Mr Acting Speaker.

Thank you very much. That was not a point of order, for starters, but I will let it go. The reason we know that is that the DUP told us that. You say that it is shameful to say that you talk to the UDA, but you talk to the UDA all the time

You talk to the UDA all the time, and you talk to the UVF. The reason we know that is that they scuppered the deal. Therefore, we sat from February 2018

From February 2018

He was not in the room

Thank you.

I have just repeated it, so there you go. We sat for two full years, from February 2018, with the same deal on the table that the DUP came back to in January 2020. So, two years. You trot out the lie about the three years, but those two years were on you. The two years were on you. We sat waiting for you to come back to exactly the same deal when, eventually, you got your MP team in line in order to get the deal done and over the line. None of us wants to be in this position. I have better things to do than to argue with those people across the way. I would prefer that we were sitting around the table with those people, working on the issues and trying to deliver support for the people whom we represent, to get money into the health service and to fix the cost-of-living issues. That is what I would like to see. I do not want to hear chirruping from the would-be First Minister on the other side of the Chamber.

That is what we need to do. That is what the people elected us to do.

1,307 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not qualifying

Second assessment

Jev’s answers did not settle this record, so a second model, claude-opus-5-5, read the same text (without the MLA’s name or party) and gave its reasons on 21 October 2026. How the second assessment works

Verdict

Not qualifying

Public interest or divisiveness

Mainly advances the public interest

Against the published rubric

Most of the speech is about practical consequences of not electing a Speaker or forming an Executive: the £400 household payment, £435 million that "we cannot allocate", the multi-year Budget and Health funding. The identity-related content is one passage claiming a party's MPs scuppered a 2018 deal "by rallying round the Orange Order, the UDA and all the others", followed by "you talk to the UDA all the time, and you talk to the UVF". Bracketing a cultural institution with loyalist paramilitaries touches the rubric's concern about tying one tradition's culture to paramilitarism. But it is a brief jab inside a partisan argument about who caused the institutions to collapse, not the speech's main thrust.

Public interest or divisiveness

The evident function of the speech is to blame another party for the Assembly's paralysis and to set out what that means for people facing the cost-of-living crisis. That is sharp party-political argument about decisions and their effects on public money and services. The Orange Order and UDA remark adds a communally loaded edge, and the rhetoric is combative throughout, with references to lies and "Trump-like" tactics. Even so, the substance concerns governance and support for households rather than identity grievance.

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:32 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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