Debate contribution: Bonfire Regulation

Debate contribution by Mr Jon Burrows on 16 September 2025.

MLA: Mr Jon Burrows
Party at the time: Ulster Unionist Party
Date: 16 September 2025
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Private Members' Business
Heading: Bonfire Regulation
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5111624

Text

I agree that the quality of the debate has mostly been substandard. First, I commend the Alliance Party for its strapline. It sums up the issues in one simple four-word phrase: "lawful, safe and respectful". I am delighted that Alliance has borrowed that phrase from me. I used it in an interview with its deputy leader during the summer, and I then started to see it in press releases. I am glad to help the Alliance Party on justice. Getting back to the substance of the motion, I can 100% say, through lived experience, that bottom-up approaches to dealing with bonfires are best. Civic society — I mean those who have elected jobs of leadership, those who are getting paid in councils and, sometimes, those in my old organisation and the 999 services — tends to want to abrogate responsibility to someone else: creating a quango or a commissioner and asking them to deal with it. Generally speaking, they just get paid for not dealing with it. The reality is that things can be done better if everyone rolls their sleeves up. Instead of waiting until the point in the cycle when you are virtually into June, people should plan early and sit down and work with working-class communities, which is often where the issues are, and ask them, "What sites are you planning to use this year?". Let us have a subcommittee of the policing and community safety partnership (PCSP), bring in the Fire and Rescue Service at that stage, before anything is actually built, and then bring in the Police Service and the relevant council. We then need to start agreeing collectively that there are certain things that we will not have. We will have no posters and no hate crime, and we will make sure that the bonfire is a safe distance from houses and that it is of a safe size. We will have an appointed person to set light to it, we will engage with the Fire Service, and we will make sure that there is no sectarian chanting and nothing on it that is a danger to the environment. None of that needs a quango, a commission or a legal framework. That is just the leadership that we never see. Everyone just wants to score points and blame the unionists.
Thank you. Hopefully, with the right leadership, that does not happen, but there are criminal investigations that can be carried out if something crosses the line. That is why, for example — this happens on both sides — when, this summer, a poster of my former colleague Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell was put up on a bonfire in the Bogside, I was working to get it down, although we could not get it down. That was disgraceful, just as it would be disgraceful if a poster of the Member were put on a bonfire. We in the Ulster Unionist Party have been consistent that both are wrong, but, in my view, this is an attack on culture. It is absolutely an attack on culture. There is something that poisons these debates for the people who are listening, and this point is directly linked to that. There are people who will say, as Members from Sinn Féin said, "Oh, it is a disgrace" when something happens such as the Moygashel bonfire. Yes, it is a disgrace, but it is also a disgrace when people shout, "Ooh, ahh, up the 'RA" and you cannot say that that is wrong. You described the Moygashel bonfire as something that causes fear and anxiety: I agree with you. I hope that those people are arrested, charged and taken to court, but you will sit and justify people saying that burning people in a hotel with a firebomb was necessary. When bonfires are things that we should regulate and burning a hotel is something that we should celebrate, you simply have moral myopia. That poisons the whole debate. I want to look forward, but how can we do that when people immediately get their backs up because they see an agenda? That is the reality. You have no authority or legitimacy when you speak. The Alliance Party, I am afraid to say, while it has a great strapline, tends to be more vocal about issues concerning unionism than those concerning republicanism. I never hear its members on 'Talkback' or 'The Nolan Show', banging the door down to call for investigations when "Ooh aah, up the 'RA" is chanted at the féile. Why can you not show leadership as the party that used to represent the middle ground? You have abdicated that.
We can. I will say this—.
Address the Chair. Sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will always respect the office of the Chair. I apologise for that profusely. The essence is that a little respect in our language towards people who have been badly traumatised and hurt in the past would allow us to have a better and more rational conversation. The way to deal with it is through leadership and from the bottom up.
I will give way in one second. We should not come in with an arbitrary commission or anything else that will just be another quango. That would be to delegate all our responsibilities to someone else.

882 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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