Debate contribution: Windsor Framework: Ongoing Harm
Debate contribution by Mr Declan Kearney on .
- MLA
- Mr Declan Kearney
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 17 November 2025
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Private Members' Business
- Heading
- Windsor Framework: Ongoing Harm
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5245209
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Just a few weeks ago, the DUP brought a variation on today's motion to the Chamber for discussion, so I find it difficult not to think that Groundhog Day is beginning to be played out once again. In the meantime, workers and families continue to face an ongoing and relentless cost-of-living crisis. Our schools are crumbling, the health service is under constant pressure and we face an unprecedented ecological crisis in our waterways and lakes. Instead, the DUP chooses to fixate on and rehearse the fallout from the Brexit calamity — the mess that the DUP helped to bring about. Once again, the Assembly is subject to another DUP revisionist sham fight, and it is all to save its blushes from the ongoing onslaught and attrition from the TUV. In a similar debate only weeks ago, I predicted that we would see a lot more of this type of negative politicking in the time ahead, and here we go again. We might as well all strap ourselves in between now and the next Assembly and council elections, because DUP race-to-the-bottom politics will become the constant order of the day, and all to shore up an electoral base that is now under pressure from the TUV. Ten years ago, the DUP was in the vanguard of the Brexit campaign. At that time, its representatives told us on the airwaves that they did not care about the consequences of Brexit so long as we left the European Union. On those same airwaves, I and others warned the DUP that that was a wrong-headed agenda, but, like lemmings and following their hero Boris Johnson, the DUP representatives quipped that really nothing else mattered.
Not at the moment. It was a case of right-wing, zero-sum politics, and, since then, the DUP has thwarted and opposed every effort to find solutions to the Brexit debacle. However, while the DUP was cheerleading for the hardest, most destructive exit from the European Union, others were, thankfully, working to minimise the impact. Then, in another British Government sop to assuage DUP anxieties, the Windsor framework was brought forward. Brexit inevitably created a whole new economic and trading context. The Windsor framework is not a panacea, but it has mitigated many of the challenges that we have had to contend with. All the experts on business and trade say that it is protecting us from the worst effects of Brexit. Business exports are up 7% in the North. At the same time, other regions caught up in the Brexit headwinds have experienced significant declines. According to NISRA, sales from the North to Britain increased by over 12% between 2022 and 2023. Cross-border trade continues to flourish. Yes, our businesses need support to help them navigate the new trading realities, and Sinn Féin firmly believes that whatever is needed should be provided. At no time in the Windsor Framework Democratic Scrutiny Committee or other Committee meetings have business groups challenged the potential of the Windsor framework to drive economic growth. The DUP knows that, because you sit on the same Committees as I and others do. Friends, the framework is here to stay, and our focus needs to be on how we can refine its further implementation. This afternoon, I say this to my colleagues in the DUP: stop wasting our and your time. Deal with your TUV problems away from the Assembly, and start to work with the rest of us to maximise opportunities for our businesses by building the regional and all-Ireland economies.
585 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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