Member's statement: Committee for the Executive Office: Committee on Standards and Privileges Report
Member's statement by Mr Timothy Gaston on .
- MLA
- Mr Timothy Gaston
- Party at the time
- Traditional Unionist Voice
- Date
- 10 February 2026
- Type
- Member's statement
- Business
- Members' Statements
- Heading
- Committee for the Executive Office: Committee on Standards and Privileges Report
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5435222
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Now that the nationalist and republican alliance sanction to exclude me from the Chamber has been served, I take the opportunity to put on record a number of things about breathegate. First, I want the House to know that, when the First Minister of no alternative appeared before the Executive Office Committee last Wednesday, I again covered a number of the same questions that the Chairperson and her mates in Sinn Féin and the SDLP took great exception to and silenced me on these Benches for. To be crystal clear, it was never out of scope to ask questions at the Executive Office Committee on behalf of victims about the sexual abuse that they suffered at the hands of IRA men. For as long as Sinn Féin jointly heads that Department, it will never be out of scope of the Committee whose flagship is ending violence against women and girls. Scrutiny does not suddenly become misconduct simply because it makes a few in the Chamber feel uncomfortable. Secondly, I turn to the public reaction to last Monday's vote. On 12 June last year, I wrote to the Committee on Standards and Privileges stating:
"Should the committee agree with the report and publish the same I look forward to being vindicated by the only body which really matters - public opinion."
Looking at the response online and in print, any objective observer must recognise that those words have proved to be prophetic. The supporting emails, the many messages, the phone calls and well over 1,000 new followers on Facebook in the past seven days show me whom the public support on the issue.
More concerning is that the truth of what lies behind the continuing refusal to release the contemporaneous note has not yet fully emerged. A step towards that truth would be the publication of the note taken during the private meeting between the First Minister and the Committee Chair — a meeting of which the Executive Office Committee has no independent record; a meeting of which the only minute was produced by the First Minister's office; and a meeting the note of which remains withheld from the public to this day. I welcome the fact that the Ulster Unionist Party has now called for the note to be published. I ask this simple question: will the Alliance Party and the SDLP follow? If Members have confidence in the standards process and in the vote that was taken last week —
— transparency should not frighten them.
417 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Assessment
Not flagged on a second assessment, because Jev’s answers did not settle it. The reasons are given below.
- Overall probability that the activity is being used to promote, exploit or escalate an identity-based controversy: 0.58 (flagging needs at least 0.70; at or below 0.30 is not flagged).
- None of the five culture-war criteria was met (each was below 0.60).
- The text adopts the identity-based framing in its own voice (0.67).
- Subject area: Legacy of the Troubles, victims and paramilitarism.
- The answers did not meet either automatic threshold.
This is an AI-generated assessment of the text, made against published criteria. It is not a finding of fact about the MLA or their intentions. The Assembly record itself is the fact.
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 flagged
- Public interest or divisiveness
- Mixed
Against the published rubric
The statement opens by casting a standards sanction as a "nationalist and republican alliance sanction" and includes the jibe "First Minister of no alternative". Both give a disciplinary dispute a communal edge. Most of the text, though, defends the right to ask questions "on behalf of victims about the sexual abuse that they suffered at the hands of IRA men" and asks for a withheld meeting note to be published. That is a transparency and accountability point that would make sense to someone who disagreed with the speaker. Its hostility is aimed at named parties and a specific process rather than at a community as a whole, so it does not clearly meet the rubric's tests for communal antagonism, cultural grievance or dog-whistling.
Public interest or divisiveness
There is real substance here: scrutiny of how allegations of abuse by IRA members were handled, and a call for an official record to be released. Alongside this, the statement keeps a personal and partisan row going, claims vindication through online followers, and frames the sanction in communal terms. Both elements are substantial, but the communal framing is limited to the opening label rather than being the main thrust.
Jev’s structured answers
| Question | Probability | Met? |
|---|---|---|
| Identity framing | 0.35 | No |
| Sectarian or communal antagonism | 0.24 | No |
| Cultural grievance politics | 0.04 | No |
| Dog-whistle messaging | 0.52 | No |
| Controversy escalation | 0.37 | No |
| Legitimate policy scrutiny | 0.27 | No |
| Overall judgement | 0.58 | Between thresholds |
| Option | Probability |
|---|---|
| No identity-based framing | 0.25 |
| Reports or questions it | 0.02 |
| Criticises or condemns it | 0.06 |
| Adopts it (chosen) | 0.67 |
| Subject | Probability |
|---|---|
| Legacy of the Troubles, victims and paramilitarism | 0.76 |
| Sectarianism, hate crime and community relations | 0.21 |
| No identity-related subject | 0.01 |
| Gender, sexuality, abortion and related social issues | 0.01 |
| Sexism, misogyny, ageism and other equality groups | 0.01 |
Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:33 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.
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