Catching up with Dawn Purvis

Back in November 2009, I posted an interview with Dawn Purvis on the blog. Since then she has left the PUP and stepped out as an independent MLA for East Belfast.

If you ask me, deep down Dawn Purvis is a political anorak who could carve out a career as a party strategist or advisor. While conveniently fitting her positive self-belief about her re-election chances, I realise that her analysis and explanation of how the other parties around her in East Belfast are approaching the upcoming election (and in some cases playing into each others’ hands) is certainly more sophisticated and well-constructed than most of the commentators who get paid to write columns in the local press.

But talking to Dawn earlier today, it was clear that she has no intention of becoming a part-time pundit or party advisor. Instead, she is confident that she’ll be re-elected to the Assembly in May.

She suggests that four years ago “people didn’t really know who I was at the time of the last election as I didn’t really have a track record in East Belfast but I’d like to think that over the last four years my record stands on its own and I think people will see that through hard graft and sticking to my principles and what I believe that I’ve done my best to represent the people”.

Her independence means that she’s “not boxed in by any party policy and can focus specifically on local issues” and have a constituency focus. She can “choose to look at big picture issues if I want but I’m not expected to be a Jacqueline of all trades and mistress of none”.

Dawn highlights the continuing educational underachievement in protestant working class areas and says that the DUP and UUP have done “absolutely nothing” about the issue.

Asked about her sense of where the UVF are in their journey towards non-violence Dawn simply answers “I don’t know, I’ve no idea”, refusing to speculate in more detail.

“I made a decision last June based on the information available to me at that time that I thought that the statement of intent that they had issued in May 2007 and subsequent to that their act of decommissioning but then followed by the murder of Bobby Moffet was a clear intent to me that there were individuals within that organisation who were never going away. So I made my decision to resign at that time, so I don’t know.”

Despite early promise, Dawn’s own private members bill (seeking to eliminate double jobbing between local councils and the Assembly) ran aground. Last night, John McCallister’s caravanning bill was completed and became the first private members bill to negotiate the legislative assault course since 1948.

A complete session of the Assembly with no suspensions and yet only one private members bill passed seems a tad lethargic? Dawn disagrees and points to comments in the chamber last night that compared the Assembly with other UK legislatures that also have low volumes of private members bills.

Asked about the achievements she is most proud of over the last four years, Dawn quickly compiles a list:

“Track record in the constituency. Networking with the community and voluntary sector. Being chair of the all party group on children and young people and pushing those issues up the agenda within government departments. The working group I established to look at educational underachievement, particularly within protestant working class boys. My bill on double jobbing, although at this point we don’t know how successful that has been as we’ve still to table final stage. I think overall the four years has been quite a learning experience and I’ve certainly gained in my knowledge of the issues that affect my constituents and I hope that I’ve represented them well.”

Earlier today - about half a mile away from Dawn’s constituency office - Tom Elliott outlined his ideas around the review of the Stormont administration and the possibilities for parties to be in opposition in 2015. Dawn recalled her advice to the SDLP and UUP after the 2007 election not to take up the three ministerial positions offered to them and to “work together with the other smaller parties in the Assembly to form a constructive opposition”.

“I think the past four years would have been better spent by those parties in forming an opposition. Their electoral gains this time around would be looking a lot more hopeful than what they are at the minute. But we need to evolve our structures in the Assembly. I think constructive opposition is a good thing. With [just] a few individuals it’s much more difficult because you lack the combined resources of parties.”

Alliance are running two candidates to pick up on any bounce from Naomi Long’s success at the Westminster elections. The DUP are a lot more confident than this time last year. The UUP haven’t quite given up - though running three candidates in East Belfast may be self destructive. And the PUP are running Brian Irvine. I asked Dawn if she felt squeezed?

“No I don’t. I think it’s all to play for. I think every candidate that runs will be going after every single vote. I don’t feel squeezed. I think maybe some of the other parties need to review their strategy in light of the last four years and even in light of the last year. I think that maybe some of them are basing their strategy on figures that may not add up at an Assembly election particularly when you are running different candidates.

I think the field is wide open. I think it’s anyone’s for the taking and it’s up to me when I’m going around the doors to convince people that they should vote for me.”

[Cross-posted from Slugger O'Toole as one of a series of interviews with representatives from smaller political parties.]

Talking in the East (part 4) // Niall Ó Donnghaile // Sinn Féin

Back in the Autumn, I put up a series of posts interviewing local East Belfast politicians. I’d one other interview recorded that never quite made it onto the blog. Partly in hope that the UUP would eventually get around to arranging their session, and it took a lot of chasing to get someone in the DUP to say yes.

I spoke to Sinn Féin’s Niall Ó Donnghaile on the afternoon of 6 November 2009. That lunchtime, the health unions had organized a rally in front of the City Hall to protest at budget cuts. The health minister Michael McGimpsey attended the rally.

As usual, the interview started by asking about East Belfast.

(Niall) I think East Belfast, like any constituency, can act as a bit of a microcosm for the rest of the North. It’s quite a diverse constituency - not just in terms of its political makeup or its ethnic makeup which is increasing all the time - but also in terms of people’s social and economic experience.

Like everywhere else: people are struggling. People are feeling the stress and the ever growing pressure of an economic recession. We’re coming from a time of what would have been considered great economic prosperity, into a time where people are having to tighten their belts …

You know I’m just away from the rally at the City Hall against any proposed cuts in the health care system and there were hundreds of people at it. Those are the issues that people are concerned about, those are the issues that people are more and more lobbying their politicians on.

We moved on to talk about new developments in East Belfast like Titanic Quarter.

(Niall) Well the difficulty with all of those developments are – at this stage – they are still very much aspirational: they are not here. …

We have a number of master plans floating about the air for East Belfast. I think in this year alone I’ve seen about five or six, and I’m seeing master plan after master plan which is being lauded on each occasion … but what we need to see is results … we need to see the master plans put into action.

I was part of a party delegation that met with Mike Smith and a couple of other people involved in Titanic Quarter. Our party ensured on the City Council that [in] their memorandum of understanding in relation to the signature project, that local established communities were to the fore in terms of the future development of something like Titanic Quarter. Sirocco Quays – as the development is going to be known – is I think worth upwards of £600 million in terms of investment. So these are all great aspirational things, but we need to see them acted upon …

Not just in relation to Short Strand – because there are a number of long established indigenous communities here – but those people need to see the benefits in terms of social housing … in terms of jobs, in terms of economic investment, in terms of skills and training people up whether it be apprenticeships, whether it be catering, whether it be leisure management. Whatever it may be, people locally are going to see the benefits of these developments and that’s something we’ve been stressing from the day and hour these people have come into contact with us …

People on the ground need to feel a change, there’s enough enclaves, there’s enough walls, there’s enough separation across the river there, we don’t need to see anymore. We can’t see a lovely new development with a wall put around it or certainly whether that be a physical wall or a physiological wall … We have been approaching each other at cross-community level – and that’s not maybe a phrase that applies to this because where this is concerned I think we should be speaking as one community and not at across-community level – but as an East Belfast community that people on the ground whether they be from Dee Street or whether Mountpottinger Road, have the benefit tangibly from these developments.

Of course a flyover separates Short Strand and the bottom of the Newtownards Road from the new land of plenty on the other side.

(Niall) And it’s something I’ve personally raised with Conor Murphy in relation to that whole area … There’s a number of different solutions … all of [the master plans] are talking about opening that whole area from the bottom of the Newtownards Road right down Bridge End across into Middlepath Street … Part of that’s very, very definitely taking the flyover there at the bottom of the Newtownards Road and the Short Strand and taking it away and I’m confident it’s going. I think it needs to go and I’d be fairly confident in a relatively short period of time it’ll be away …

But again there’s no point taking that away, you’re still going to have a big road there … Even the DSD’s latest master plan in relation to East Belfast, I must say I was quite disappointed at it. It’s almost as if looking at the thing - and you can accuse me of being parochial if you so wish - but I think the DSD forgot the Short Strand exists when they were carrying out this master plan into that part of the city. And that for me was quite disappointing.

I asked how Short Strand sat in greater East Belfast.

(Niall) You’re right in saying that Short Strand is a nationalist and republican community, but there has always been integration in the Short Strand, whether that be in terms of people coming into work, people travelling through it on the bus or people walking through it to go into the city centre, whatever it might me. You’d also be quite surprised at the amount of people from protestant or unionist backgrounds who actually live in that area, and who are maybe in mixed marriages as well.

Once you actually sit down and think about it, it is actually quite stark, it is actually quite a mixed community but I take your point in terms of how it’s been perceived in the media over the years, it has been viewed and classed as a nationalist and republican community. But there are a lot of - and there have been for a lot of years - there are a lot of projects and work going on on the ground.

So what type of projects and discussions?

(Niall) Personally I have been involved in things that haven’t been public but have involved people coming together and being quite open and being quite frank, having the hard discussions and I think that’s where they need to be had. I think they need to be had on the ground at a community level.

Talking in the East (part 3) // PUP // Dawn Purvis

For the third in this series of interviews, I talked to Dawn Purvis, MLA for East Belfast and leader of the Progressive Unionist Party in her Stormont Office on Wednesday 11 November. Read on to discover her views on East Belfast, her party and its pro-choice policy, as well as education and how she entered the world of politics.

As usual I started by asking about her views of the opportunities and challenges facing the area that she represents.

(Dawn) There are quite a lot of challenges. Certainly where my office is based on the Newtownards Road, would be classed as Ballymacarrett ward, which is in the top ten most deprived wards out of 566 in Northern Ireland. And that ward faces many challenges including educational underachievement, high unemployment, health inequalities, lack of development in nought to four year olds, intervention in terms of parenting skills, job and training opportunities as there’s a lot of challenges in that particular area.

And the challenges I suppose in different parts of East Belfast would be different according to the wealth of the ward you’re talking about. So for example, further out in East Belfast in the Belmont area, you’re facing challenges around flooding, dog poo, street lighting, pelican crossings. The issues change according to the neighbourhood. ...

But there are lots of opportunities in East Belfast. Tourism potential is big. I don’t think it’s been capitalised upon and we’ve still a lot of work to do, particularly around Sirocco Quays, Titanic Quarter development, because the potential opportunities there for the greater East Belfast area not to mention the areas that are just on the periphery of Sirocco Quays and Titanic Quarter, and of course Northern Ireland wide.

I think what’s disappointing at the minute is that those potential opportunities haven’t materialised very well. Whether that’s the effects of the economic recession: and we know that developers have been hardest hit by the recession. Whether that is a lack of partnership working with developers and government – for example, planning department or the Department of Employment and Learning or other smaller agencies within East Belfast – remains to be seen.

To me, Titanic Quarter and Sirocco Quays seem isolated sitting on the other side of a big flyover, as well as isolated in terms of the wealth of those who could afford to live there.

(Dawn) Well, I think the concerns of the communities in Inner East including Short Strand, Lower Newtownards Road, and Templemore Avenue ... have been well aired both with the Carville Group and with Titanic Quarter Developments Ltd. In terms of don’t be building a walled city or a walled village on the periphery of East Belfast to the exclusion of everyone else in East Belfast or you’re saving up problems.

The communities there want to be part of the consultation around the development, want to be part of the housing in terms of the developers ensuring there is social and affordable housing but also in terms of construction jobs, apprenticeships, and latterly when the development is complete more high value jobs and a stake in that community. Because it is part of their community, it is part of East Belfast and always has been.

So I think it’s important that the developers realise the linkages in geographical terms but also culturally and community terms.

Which leads to a future vision of people walking to work, following the route trod by their parents and grandparents, from the bottom of the Newtownards Road across to the land that used employ so many from the area.

(Dawn) And that’s why access is very, very important and I know that Titanic Quarter developments had plans for a walkover and a new road etc. But they’ve probably gone on the back burner because of the economic recession but they are no less important in the future development, the future investment in the area. That local people have access, otherwise, it just becomes a walled village, people see that there’s no opportunities for them and they’ve no connection, and no buy in with that.

And building community cohesion is very, very difficult as we know at the best of times. Building social capital is very difficult at the best of times within communities that are deprived in relation to other communities. And I think it’s very important for Titanic Quarter developments, for the vision of the community they want to have in that area, it’s not just about young professionals, it’s not just about wealthy families. And Sirocco Quays is the same. They actually want a vibrant city/village community, and that means you need families, you need a mix of ages, and you need a mix of wealth as well in order to create that dynamic.

I asked about Short Strand and whether Dawn saw signs of more integration with the surrounding areas. Which led to an unexpected reference to the Berlin Wall!

Talking in the East (part 2b) // Alliance // Naomi Long

So the promised follow-up post to the earlier first part of my interview with Naomi Long, Alliance party MLA for East Belfast as well as councillor for Victoria ward and – this year – Lord Mayor of Belfast.

Part of this round-the-parties exercise is to open up individual and party views to a wider audience – so you get to make the judgements and figure out what you make of it all!

In this section, I started by asking for her impressions of the opportunities and challenges that face East Belfast. She kicked off with some of the current changes in the area, starting with Titanic Quarter.

(Naomi) ... we need to find ways of ensuring that as that huge site develops - I mean it’s the largest redevelopment site in Europe - so as we develop that we need to make sure that it is connected into East Belfast so that people in East Belfast can feel that it’s accessible to them and not closed off from them, because obviously as a former industrial site it was closed off … And we also need to make sure that is well integrated into the rest of the city, because that is going to be the future of Titanic Quarter, it’s going to be part of the city centre expanse.

… we are very top heavy in terms of public sector employment ... a lot of people who find themselves in almost a double dip recession sort of situation, where having come out of the private sector recession we now face a public sector recession with potentially people losing jobs ... I think that is a major challenge for us as we try to regear the economy so we get more people out of the public sector into private sector and I suppose the question is in terms of the tightening belt for public expenditure how quickly the belt tightens because I think it is a good thing to get people out of the public sector reliance and into the private sector employment but if you try to do it now when there is no private sector employment you’re just creating a major problem.

She went onto talk about the regeneration of the Newtownards Road, its connection to the city centre and keeping communities connected.

(Naomi) I mean I think Belfast is in a much better shape than it was ten or fifteen years ago; but the Newtownards Road is in a much worse shape that it was ten or fifteen years ago. And we need to make sure we don’t have a sort of twin track approach to development where city centres and affluent suburbs do very well and inner city communities suffer.

... there is a lot of work being done by the local partnership board and with others ... things like living over the shops scheme, shop frontage schemes as well as public realm ... particular sites along that road which are very run down and look in very poor shape, a lot of dereliction particularly around the junction with the Albert Bridge Road and it creates a kind of social and economic precipice on the road because above it towards the Holywood Arches and beyond actually there is a reasonably vibrant kind of economic driver there around the Arches.

I think allied to that we have a challenge in terms of how we deal with things around the interface, and with the very visible signs of sectarianism because I think the other thing that will influence whether people are willing to invest in a community is how stable and welcoming and open that community feels. So I think there’s a challenge in terms of trying to deal with some of the interface tensions.

I’ve been up at Shankill recently doing some of their reimaging programme launches and to see the developments that have been made there is hugely encouraging and I know that there has been some work done around the Newtownards Road on some of those issues like bonfires and so on, but I think we need to start upping the pace on that because I don’t want people to walk away from that area where I grew up and choose other easier places. I would like to be able to see people in that area be able to benefit from what is happening in the city.

Picking up on the mention of “the interface” I asked about her perception of Short Strand’s integration with the rest of East Belfast.

(Naomi) ... there are more conversations that happen across the wall now than there would have been for a very long time. Is it more stable? I think it is. But is there still potential for violence and for things to fall apart? Yes, there clearly is and we saw that just on the August bank holiday when we ended up with rioting where a situation can escalate very quickly.

Talking in the East (part 2a) // Alliance // Naomi Long

In the second of the six planned interviews, on Tuesday 20 October I talked to Naomi Long, Alliance party MLA for East Belfast as well as councillor for Victoria ward and – this year – Lord Mayor of Belfast.

Confident, professional, warm and with so much to say! Naomi gave wide ranging answers that were peppered with very specific examples to illustrate her points. There is no way I can reproduce the full half hour interview on the blog! A few snippets are embedded as video clips. The post length is probably my fault for going in with very open questions.

This post will deal with the questions around the Alliance Party and public engagement with politics and how Naomi got into politics in the first place. And I’ve split the remaining section of the interview that deals with East Belfast issues into a second post that will appear online tomorrow.

Given that we’re in the last straights before a general election, I asked Naomi about the future of the Alliance party and how it was changing and adapting.

(Naomi) Well next year we’ll be forty years old, so it’s a milestone for us and I think our core message in many ways hasn’t changed in that our core message was ultimately we all need to be pulling in the same direction if we’re going to make a difference in society and we’ve kind of had that as our core theme throughout the years.

Now obviously it adapts because circumstances change so where in the 1970s the issue of inward migration was a fairly peripheral issue it’s now a more significant portion of the work that we do.

Religious and cultural diversity again in the 1970s was less of an issue than it is now but the central theme is that if you want society to function well everyone has to have a stake in society, everyone has to have influence over what happens, and everybody needs to be engaged and treated with respect and dignity and that has been our underlying principle right through.

Clearly we’re still very focussed on issues around sectarian division and I think it is right that we should be because those sectarian divisions and indeed the levels of sectarianism, there is no evidence that that has changed.

The peace process has brought a political accommodation and to some degree that has spilled over into a community accommodation. What it hasn’t really brought is a resolution so there is still a lot of division and a lot of hatred in the community, and we need to support people who are working around those issues to allow them to make progress on the ground ...

But Naomi doesn’t believe that it’ll be solved just by “throwing money at the problem”. Central government has to be listening and have a vision.

(Naomi) We do need to look at how we spend government money if we’re serious with the belt tightening we’re going to be making cuts then we can’t ignore the money that is spent on segregation. We just can’t. It’s a billion pounds a year, so it’s not money that we can afford to ignore. I’m not saying you can unlock it tomorrow, you need to start looking at it in the same way you look at every part of the system and challenge it and say why are we doing … why are we providing two of this, why do we have to provide different bus services for schools that are on the same road and on the same route simply because they are wearing different uniforms or go to different churches on a Sunday, so we need to start challenging how we do business as a community and start to challenge the underlying prejudice that goes with it.

Post-primary education and the devolution of policing and justice are two big issues that Alliance have been talking about. So I asked which was a greater priority? To be honest, I expected the answer to be that the two issues couldn’t be crudely compared. But ...

(Naomi) I think that in terms of the community I would be in no doubt that education is the biggest priority out of the two. And I mean the evidence for that is fairly clear. I sit as vice chair of the OFMDFM committee in Stormont and we had a public consultation on the Policing and Justice Bill and we had no public responses. In a situation like that it is clear that you wouldn’t get that level of nil response to education. You just wouldn’t.

So for the community, what matters around policing is how it is delivered on the ground. Not who runs it at the top. So I would say without doubt priority number one in terms of the community out of the two would be education.

She felt that the reasons for devolving policing and justice were “not well articulated”.

Talking in the East (part 1) // SDLP // Séamas de Faoite

As mentioned yesterday, I’ve been working around the main political parties in East Belfast to find out how each of them views their local area, their party’s future and the level of public engagement with the political institutions that have a lot of influence over the shape of our society.

The SDLP don’t have an elected representative in East Belfast. They have a couple of councillors across in Castlereagh borough (Castlereagh South and West wards) but no one elected to Belfast City

Council or representing East Belfast as an MLA at NI Assembly.

So I got in touch with the youthful Séamas de Faoite, seventeen year old prospective candidate for the SDLP in the Pottinger Ward of East Belfast. His youth belies his seriousness about politics and his enthusiasm about his future contribution. The interview was recorded back on 19 October 2009.

I started by asking about his impressions of the opportunities and challenges that face East Belfast?

(Séamas) There are a huge amount of challenges at the offset that face the east of the city, not least so in terms of regeneration. But the opportunities that are there for us to attract investment, to up-skill the workforce and to make East Belfast an industrial and scientific hub that it once was. Once again I think now, in the east of the city, there is that potential ...

I would certainly think that there is a failure of the larger parties to deliver on the investment opportunities that are there and for the sitting MP and some of the other people involved to actually advocate more for the bread and butter needs of the people in East Belfast rather than playing sectarian football on every single issue.

Talking about how Titanic Quarter might integrate with the rest of East Belfast ...

(Séamas) Titanic Quarter obviously has a lot of problems facing it at the moment because of the economic situation that we’re in. ...

So on the offset we have to make sure that if Titanic Quarter is going to work that it’s actually going to succeed in being built and actually filling the units that are going to be there. Not so much my fear but I can see possibly what could happen is that if units aren’t bought up in Titanic Quarter that the government is going to have to step in and intervene.

If Titanic Quarter succeeds, obviously there has to be integration with the rest of East Belfast and especially down in the area that’s going to be linked to it - Short Strand, areas like that. The Titanic Quarter cannot just be Titanic Quarter boxed off away from everyone else. It has to be part of East Belfast as a whole and that’s all part of integration and breaking down the barriers that we’ve had over the past throughout the city. So perhaps Titanic Quarter will give us a stepping stone in the east to try and do that.

Commenting on whether or not there is any evidence of integration between the predominantly nationalist Short Strand area and the rest of East Belfast, Séamas pointed back to the end of August and the violence that erupted at the interface after a rally celebrating the closure of the Mountpottinger Police Station.

(Séamas) ... it’s disheartening especially after you see the events what happened over the bank holiday Monday where we had dissidents on both sides of the divide come out and bring us back to that basic level we were at in the 1970s and the 1980s. I don’t want to see us moving back to that position.

We do things better when we work together. Northern Ireland wastes £1.7 billion every year on duplication of services, we have to seriously ask do we really need that duplication of services. One of the best ways of tackling that is through integration and through saying to people: we are all human beings, we all have the same needs, our wants may be different but we all need the same basic services provided by the government and the best thing to do is to provide them to each person on the basis of them being a human being and not of them being nationalist or unionist or catholic or protestant.

There is considerable voter apathy during the recent European elections and a general lack of public engagement with politics. What did Séamas think?

(Séamas) The generation of leaders that we have in Northern Ireland at the moment have been there for the past twenty or fifteen years. They are basically, it’s like the Muppet Show on repeat at the moment. So I think people are turning off as a result of that. They are seeing the same old arguments played out by the same old characters and they don’t like it.

If we actually had some real, relevant debate and not just about sectarian issues or issues to do with Northern Ireland’s future, but about the economy, about education and not turning it into a sectarian football, and all of these different sorts of things, I think people would actually be less apathetic.

Maybe I’ve missed the story, but I’d never heard the suggestion of moving the Assembly down to Titanic Quarter before.

(Séamas) I think the Assembly is very distant from ordinary people and despite the fact that Stormont Live and all of the other different initiatives to try and get more engaged with ordinary people, it’s very distant. And then when you have initiatives like the Assembly Roadshow which are supposed to get people engaged and they come to East Belfast and only Dawn Purvis shows up for the panel, it kind of says to people, well the Assembly couldn’t really care less about you.

I think certainly if as part of the Titanic Quarter in the future the proposals that the Assembly might be moved where it’s closer to the people, where it’s closer to the ordinary lives of the people of Northern Ireland and certainly in Belfast, I think bringing the Assembly closer to ordinary people needs to happen because it seems so distant.

Doesn’t seem credible to me. I’m sure why the people living in high rise apartments in TQ will be any more “ordinary” than those living within a half mile radius of Stormont?

Asked about his view of the SDLP as it goes forward, Séamas talked about party member apathy and the need for succession planning.

(Séamas) We have huge challenges ahead like any smaller party that was once the top dog ... certainly I think the SDLP has an opportunity to rebuild itself over the next six months and moving into the Westminster elections and the council elections in 2011 ...
In South Belfast we have over 600 paper members, but we don’t have activists and that is certainly something that we’re going to need to look at. And a big issue is succession strategy and getting new and younger people involved in the party and getting them encouraged to run for council, at council level to start of with and building up from there.

Some would explain the last Assembly election results as voters turning away from moderate centrist parties and back to the Sinn Fein and the DUP. I asked Séamas what he though the SDLP could do about that.

(Séamas) I suppose the best thing to say to people is sectarian views don’t put money in your pocket. They don’t hold jobs in Northern Ireland. They don’t help us maintain the NHS in Northern Ireland or to try and improve the NHS. They don’t help us put funds in schools. They don’t help us up-skill workers who have lost their jobs in industry. Sectarian values, not so much values, but sectarian views and polarisation. It doesn’t help. When we work together, we deliver more and that’s been proven time and time again, not just in Northern Ireland but across the world in areas where there has been conflict.

Séamas detailed how he saw the saw SDLP appealing to a wider electoral base.

(Séamas) ... I come from a centre left background, and that would be where my political opinions would be, but certainly I think the SDLP should be appealing to a wider support base of people who not necessarily would agree with us on the question about whether Ireland should be united or not, but certainly people who would agree with us on what the Executive’s economic priorities should be and what we should be doing to try to get us out of this economic crisis.

He felt that the housing crisis in East Belfast was a doorstep issue with voters.

(Séamas) The SDLP holds the position at ministerial level of the Department of Social Development. So we have been looking for the money to build more social houses. And in my own opinion, East Belfast seems to be one of the areas that really needs to benefit from that sort of money. So if people come out and vote for us and support the fact that we’re trying to deliver on a social housing agenda which benefits everybody and especially in East Belfast where there is such a demand, that is something where they are going to get a positive response from coming out and voting for the SDLP.

I finished by asking how Séamas had got started on his journey into politics.

(Séamas) I wouldn’t say it’s the start of my journey. I’ve been involved for the past four years, but not in Northern Ireland. Certainly I see it as that this part of the world and certainly Northern Ireland we have this terrible ability to bring everything down to baseline sectarian politics and I don’t particularly agree with that. I don’t like it. I think really we should be working towards delivering on the things that are mutually beneficial to everybody and I think that is what the Assembly should be for.

So I set out on a journey in politics because I want to make a difference, and I know it sounds like every other young politician has ever started out says that. But when you actually see what differences can be made, and what can be done. Some of my inspirational heroes, people like Teddy Kennedy and the Clintons and the things that they have done in bringing about health care reform and trying to bring peace to Northern Ireland. In all of these different things where they have actually mattered, they have delivered on something. That is an inspiration I think to young people who want to get involved in politics, that if you become involved you can actually get something done.

Mulling over the interview, while Séamas speaks eloquently, he has much to do to extend his knowledge of the local area and build up a repertoire of specific examples to drop in to illustrate his answers. Maybe that’s a harsh conclusion about a seventeen year old - but he is currently the SDLP’s loudest voice in the heart of East Belfast.

I’ll reflect more across the six party representatives and their converging and diverging viewpoints towards the end of the process.