Funding call for Stormont justice department

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will meet the North's political leaders today as they appeal for funding to support the deal agreed by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin.

The parties want financial backing for the creation of a new Department of Justice at Stormont when policing and justice responsibility is devolved from Westminster.

The new powers will be transferred under the terms of the deal unveiled yesterday by First Minister and DUP leader Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin.

The agreement ends a stand-off that has blocked meetings of the Assembly Executive since June.

Ahead of a meeting later today with Brown, McGuinness said the Executive would be seeking support for the deal and he underlined his belief that the agreement would stick, despite the absence of a date for devolution.

The Sinn Féin representative said: “The important thing is that we now have an agreement and we have an agreement which will deliver the transfer of powers on policing and justice.

“You just have to look at the process paper which we published yesterday. There is a start point and an end point and it ends up with Peter Robinson and myself asking for powers to be transferred from Westminster to our Executive.”

Sources have said the process will take an unspecified number of months, but McGuinness said he was satisfied the move would go ahead.

The North’s ministers will meet tomorrow in the first Executive meeting since the dispute began and a programme to tackle economic issues will top the agenda.

On the wider political front, the DUP’s David Simpson repeated yesterday that Sinn Féin would be barred from the Justice Minister’s job for a “political lifetime”.

Today his party’s junior minister Jeffrey Donaldson told the BBC that the DUP believed that remained the case under the terms of this deal, but he said he hoped relations between the two parties had improved.

McGuinness, meanwhile, pointed out that the system for selecting the Justice Minister will be renegotiated by May 2012.

Sinn Féin and the DUP have already said they would not seek the new justice role, fuelling speculation it would go to the Alliance Party.

But asked if Sinn Féin would now support a minister drawn from the ranks of the SDLP, McGuinness said: “I very much have an open mind about that.”