Trimble warns on ‘sleepwalking’ into elections

Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble has called on the Government to explain to people what they would be voting for in the May 29 election.

Speaking this morning on BBC Good Morning Ulster, the former First Minister said: “I think there is sufficient time for the Government to answer the questions that I’ve posed, because there are ways in which we can consider whether the Assembly is going to discharge the full range of functions in the first instance, or whether it’s going to have a shadow period, in the way that the Assembly did in 1998. Are we going to proceed by the same way or are we going to explore different ways of proceeding?

“Simply to sleepwalk into an election without telling people what we’re going to do would be wrong, and I know that time is short because the Government, understandably, has spent a lot of time up trying to get republicans to carry out their obligations and have failed to do that. But they’ve now got to focus immediately on this issue. There isn’t, at present, a need to postpone the elections, but if the question is not addressed satisfactorily then the Government have to do some hard thinking.”

Mr Trimble said he was “appalled” at Sinn Féin claims that the current impasse was down to the Government’s failure to implement the Agreement.

He said: “The failure is the failure of republicans. I was present, together with others, in Hillsborough at the beginning of March, listening to the republican leadership assuring people how they were focused and what was necessary to be done.”

Mr Trimble called on the republican leadership to explain why they had “failed”.

He said: “We need to consider then what we do for the future because what is being asked for isn’t anything new, it is what the Agreement said, the complete disarmament of paramilitary groups and operating purely peacefully, without a private army. Republicans have singularly failed to deliver on these matters.”

(SP)