Mallon attacks Trimble over use of meetings veto

Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon said that today Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble had made a serious mistake by using his veto to exclude Sinn Fein from north-south ministerial bodies.

Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon said that today Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble had made a serious mistake by using his veto to exclude Sinn Fein from north-south ministerial bodies.

Mr Mallon promised he would not use his in the same way, warning that it was the Good Friday institutions and the mainstream parties supporting them that suffered as a result of such vetos.

But he did not believe that the current crisis would lead to a suspension of the institutions, which he said could not survive such a blow.

Mr Trimble admitted yesterday that the tactic of barring Sinn Fein ministers from cross-border ministerial meetings may not force the IRA to move on decommissioning.

It backfired on the Ulster Unionists last week, when Ireland's health minister Michael Martin agreed instead to a bilateral meeting with his Northern Irish counterpart, Sinn Fein's Bairbre de Brun.

Mr Mallon, SDLP deputy leader, was harshly critical of Mr Trimble's action. He told BBC1's Breakfast with Frost: "It is very clear that what he has done is counter to the Good Friday Agreement, counter to the legislation on which it is based.

"It is breaking the programme for government we produced two weeks ago, it is breaking our own ministerial code. I don't think there is any doubt whatsoever that it is a breakage of all our rules in such a way that runs completely against the whole basic thesis of the Good Friday Agreement, which is inclusivity and all parties working together."

Mr Mallon added: "He has a veto. I have a veto. He has chosen to use his veto and I think that is a mistake.

"I think it is a mistake, in a two-veto situation, for that veto ever to be used in this way. I am certainly not going to engage in threatening to use the other veto. I am not going to do that because it would be bad for the political process."

Two previous suspensions of the executive and institutions had provided no resolution of the decommissioning problem, and there was no reason to expect that another would be more successful, said Mr Mallon.

"I don't believe that the body politic could withstand another suspension. You can't simply turn off and turn on the taps of institutions like we have and hope that they will survive.

"I don't believe they would survive and I don't think it will happen."

Mr Mallon agreed that it was "necessary" for the IRA to engage with the de Chastelain decommissioning body as Sinn Fein promised it would at Hillsborough in June. Engagement had so far occurred only in a "cursory" way, he said.

But he insisted that the decommissioning issue should not be allowed to undermine the functioning of the institutions created by the Agreement, which were an entirely separate issue.

"Once you leak (the decommissioning issue) into the political process in terms of the institutions, then it is the institutions that suffer and, by definition, it is David Trimble himself and myself and the political parties who have no control over decommissioning who suffer in this debate," he said.

"I stand by the Agreement, I am not going to be pushed off it by any political section in Northern Ireland, because I believe it is only by using and working these institutions properly that we ultimately will get the proper political working relationship that we need."