The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland's cross-community party

 David Ford

Nine years on and still much work to be done in Northern Ireland

11.19.05am BST (GMT +0100) Fri 6th Apr 2007

Portrait-yellow: MCCARTHY Kieran (photography: Allan Leonard)

Alliance Party Chief Whip Kieran McCarthy MLA

Alliance Party Chief Whip Kieran McCarthy MLA has stated that massive progress has been made since the Good Friday Agreement nine years ago; however, he said that much work is still needed to secure genuine and stable power-sharing and create a real shared future.

The Strangford MLA said: "Nine years ago we signed the Good Friday Agreement. It has taken a long time to get things going when you consider that we had the full framework in place to enable devolution in 1998.

"You cannot however underestimate the progress made in the past few years on areas like IRA decommissioning and support for the police and the rule of law.

"Last weeks devolution deal was extremely significant; however we still have a long way to go in building the society that local people deserve.

"We need to ensure that powersharing is genuine and is not some kind of tribal carve-up. Genuine, inclusive and accountable powersharing will copperfasten devolution here, a carve-up will make it unstable and threaten its existence.

"The DUP and Sinn Fein still have to convince people that they are capable of working together.

"A massive amount of work is still required to build a shared future. To do that we must end segregation which is costing us 1 billion pounds every year. Only Alliance is committed to ending segregation."

ENDS

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Previous news story: Workplaces must gear up to stub out smoking in three weeks time (Thu 5th Apr 2007).
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