Harris: UUP and DUP should merge

SENATOR Eoghan Harris last night urged the North’s two unionist parties to merge and help stop Sinn Féin’s electoral successes on north and south of the Border.

Mr Harris urged Reg Empey’s Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to become one political organisation.

“There no longer is a real foundation for the continued existence of two Unionist parties,” the Bertie Ahern-appointed senator said in Belfast at last night’s annual dinner of the Castlereagh central branch of the UUP. “(The DUP’s) Peter Robinson has suggested that your parties should meet to discuss possible areas of co-operation electorally.

“This proposal makes a lot of sense but it should be part of a more profound engagement between the two organisations.”

He said the first action of such a party should be to get its own Westminster candidates returned for the seat of South Belfast and the constituency of Fermanagh & South Tyrone. The SDLP and Sinn Féin hold seats in South Belfast.

Mr Harris said a single united unionist party would be in a stronger position in the Republic and Britain than two separate pro-union parties.

“Thanks to the work of both Bertie Ahern and David Trimble, you can look south to the many people in all the main parties who have no time for Shinner apologetics or for northern nationalist whinging.”

A combined unionist front would combat what he termed “powerful forces in the Republic’s media and in the collective unconscious of the southern electorate that cleave to a nationalist narrative of the carnage which Northern Ireland endured for 30 years”.