FROM:- David McConaghie, Chairman, DUP, Craigavon Branch.
Over recent months the UUP’s Sammy Gardiner MLA has launched a succession of utterly phoney, increasingly hysterical and truly bizarre attacks on the DUP. Each of these has been thoroughly debunked.
His latest letter was a case in point. He initi
ally sought to lay blame for the 160 year old problems surrounding Lurgan railway crossing at the door of the DUP.
He did this despite the fact that this indeed a 160 year old problem (which he himself even conceded). He did it despite the failure of the old Stormont government to address it, the failure of his new Tory partners to address during 18 unbroken years of rule, and the failure of the UUP Trimble-led Executive to address it.
He did it even though the DUP is the largest party during the worst economic downturn and set of economic conditions since the Wall St. Crash and ‘hungry thirties.’
Sam Gardiner also did it without suggesting a single project he would require the DUP to cancel, postpone or delay in order to finance it; without offering a single word or a single hard fact by way of costing; and without a single reference to a single penny of the waste of public money that occurs in his own area of Assembly interest (ie Health which just happens to be presided over by his own UUP colleague).
In my response I answered Sam Gardiner – word by word, line by line, phoney attack by phoney attack. I didn’t hide. I didn’t duck. I didn’t seek to divert or distract attention away from the issue. I tackled it openly and head on.
And what is Sammy Gardiner’s response? Instead of himself now also dealing openly and in detail with the matter that he himself first raised; he announced that he was now ditching that line of phoney attack on the DUP and that he would be having nothing more to do with me.
But in the process what else did he do? That’s right – even as he scurried into the undergrowth he spat yet another utterly phoney attack upon the DUP over his shoulder.
One is left asking just how much could one unionist truly hate other unionists. Just how completely can someone be eaten up by bitterness? Just how comprehensively can someone allow themselves to be swallowed up whole by pettiness?
Sam Gardiner has now said that he will not be putting pen to paper on this again. I hope that this is not merely the end of this particular display of public foolishness and spite, but that it signals an end to his succession of phoney attacks.
As Sammy Gardiner has now said that he will no longer be replying I will conclude this correspondence by simply saying that I wish Sammy had never embarked down this path and also that I now wish that at his stage of life Sam Gardiner soon manages to set aside those bitter impulses that have been so evident in his recent comments.
