UUP Leader challenges DUP to be transparent on Comprehensive Agreement Details
Following the government’s refusal to publish details of the Comprehensive Agreement of December 2004, UUP Leader Sir Reg Empey today called on the DUP to be upfront and transparent and voluntarily give details of their side deals.
In a statement Sir Reg said,
“The Comprehensive Agreement would have created:
- a Review Group to consider extra North-South bodies over and above the six bodies and six areas of co-operation in the 1998 Agreement
- a North-South parliamentary forum, whereas the 1998 Agreement merely provided for its “consideration”
- a North-South civic forum type arrangement, which is bizarre given that the Civic Forum was bitterly attacked by the DUP who called for its disbandment
- a statutory requirement on the First and Deputy First Ministers to nominate Ministers to go to the NSMC.
This is as much as the public knows of the deal. In all of recent talks the UUP has made transparency its key objective. We have published details of talks on our web-page and will continue to do so. We did this because we believe that secretive side deals, where nobody but the signatories to those deals knows what is coming out of the woodwork next, are hugely corrosive to the political process.
The public have a right to know what was agreed and what outworkings of that deal are likely to trickle through the process in the coming months. I am calling on the DUP to be upfront, transparent and prove that the days of wink, wink, nudge, nudge politics are at an end.”