Paisley calls for Hain to quit over economy remarks

Peter Hain should quit the British government over comments in the United States advocating an all-Ireland economy, the Rev Ian Paisley said today.

Following a meeting with Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in Dublin, the Democratic Unionist Party leader lambasted the Northern Ireland Secretary after he was quoted in an Irish American newspaper saying the North’s economy was not sustainable in the long run.

Mr Hain was reported to have told the New York-based Irish Echo: “In future decades, it is going to be increasingly difficult to look at the economy of north and south except as a sort of island of Ireland economy.

“We are deepening north-south co-operation in a number of areas.

“The Northern Ireland economy, though it is doing better than ever in its history, is not sustainable in the long-term.

“I don’t want the Northern Ireland economy to be a dependent economy as it is now, with a sort of UK ‘big brother’ umbrella over it. It needs to be much more self-sufficient, so that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Mr Paisley said the comments were disgraceful.

“He has never been a friend of Northern Ireland and by making that statement he has tried to undermine all the good work that has been done to get American firms into Northern Ireland,” the North Antrim MP said.

“Peter Hain has come, Peter Hain will go but Ulster will go on forever. He should resign and go home.”

The Northern Ireland Secretary’s comments were welcomed by the nationalist SDLP and Sinn Féin, whose general secretary Mitchel McLaughlin said they acknowledged the economic argument behind calls for Irish unity.

The Foyle Assembly member said: “A small island with a population of just over five million people cannot develop successful economic strategies on the basis of economic division.

“The smaller northern economy within that is unsustainable by itself and cannot exist in isolation.

“The result is an inefficient, ineffective and unequal economy characterised by high levels of economic inactivity, poverty and inequality.

“Competition between north and south and neglect of all-Ireland economic opportunities is wasting money every day. The only way to truly transform the economy in the north of Ireland is to set it in the context of an island-wide strategy for development and regeneration.

“To succeed, any economic development strategy must, at a minimum, remove the barriers to north/south business development and trade and to cross-border working mobility.”