People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll has responded to this evening’s statement from the DUP, about their continued engagement within the Executive.
Carroll said: "Strip away the bluster and the DUP's message is simple: they'll keep their wages and ministerial cars, and spend what's left of this mandate obstructing anything that might materially improve people's lives.”
“Gavin Robinson has admitted collapsing Stormont would hurt them at the ballot box. So instead his MLAs will sit on £67,200 a year – and over £105,000 for their ministers – and use the Petition of Concern to 'thwart' Assembly business.”
“If a nurse, care worker or classroom assistant announced they'd spend the next six months deliberately not doing their job, they'd be sacked. Yet the DUP expects a pay packet for it.”
"Look at their record before they even found this excuse. They used the Petition of Concern to block raising the age of criminal responsibility, so ten-year-olds can still be arrested and prosecuted - the lowest age in Europe. They've stalled the Good Jobs Bill for months and demanded the trade union rights be ripped out of it. They're lining up to obstruct the ban on conversion practices, which would protect young LGBTQ+ people from abuse. Let’s not forget this is also the party that blocked equal marriage with a Petition of Concern. Whether it’s children's rights, workers' rights or equal rights - they've opposed the lot.”
"What exactly is left to obstruct? Pay deals for public sector workers? Tackling climate change? Proper investment in our health service? Building desperately-needed social housing? From where people in West Belfast are standing, the DUP has been thwarting progress for years. They've just finally put it in writing.”
"Working-class people - nationalist, unionist and ‘other’ - are sick of being held hostage to this carve-up. They deserve representatives who turn up and fight for them - not politicians who take a fat pay packet to block their rights."