Northern Ireland
Dail Éireann — 2023-03-21
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

The attitude of the DUP to the Windsor Framework and the Stormont brake, which was a major concession to the party, just shows that it will do absolutely anything to cling onto the sectarian bandwagon and maintain the sectarian status quo . When we see that, does it not suggest that if we need a force that can challenge the sectarianism the DUP seeks to perpetuate, the place to look is the public sector strikes in the North, where we have seen health workers and teachers, Catholic and Protestant, united, fighting for decent pay and conditions? Those are the sorts of forces that can challenge the sectarianism the DUP wants to perpetuate. Also, if we want to further that process of challenging sectarianism from the bottom up, one major stumbling block is the fact that things like the health service down here in the South continue to be dominated by Catholic religious organisations and we continue to have a two-tier system rather than a national health service.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-03-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:42+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-03-21