WHEN Stephen Farry stood up for the first time in the House of Commons the constituents of North Down heard something they hadn’t heard before.
‘Go rabh maith agat, Leas-Cheann Comhairle’ was the opening phase of Farry’s maiden speech after his election as the MP for North Down in December 2019, an Irish language phrase which translates simply as ‘Thank you, Deputy Speaker’.
The phrase itself wasn’t controversial but the language it was expressed in by an MP from Northern Ireland’s largest unionist constituency was hugely controversial, and while it hasn’t defined his four years representing the constituency, it has continued to dog him and will undoubtedly be thrown up by his political opponents as the election campaign gathers momentum.
But Farry is unapologetic about his decision because he is not a unionist. “I have always been very clear, I am a cross community politician, I am not approaching this as a unionist.
“The crucial point to me is that the Irish language isn’t something that belongs to the nationalist or republican agenda. It belongs to the island of Ireland, particularly Presbyterians who were involved in the revival of the language in the late 19th century’.
Farry is an unashamed liberal, a progressive, who had carried out a long, 26-year political apprenticeship first as one of the youngest councillors in Northern Ireland when he was elected to North Down Council in 1993, then as an Assemblyman in 2007 which included five years as Minister for Employment and Learning.
In 2019, North Down’s long standing and hugely popular MP Sylvia Hermon announced she was stepping down and with no obvious uniting unionist figure, Farry and the Alliance Party saw their chance to take the seat. It was a tall ask. In the 2017 general election Hermon had comfortably topped the poll with 41.2% of the vote followed by Alex Easton with 38.1%. The Alliance candidate, Andrew Muir, limped over in in third place, way behind with just 9.3% of the vote.
But Hermon’s departure from the political scene left North Down unionism without one of the big beasts who had so dominated politics for decades – Jim Kilfedder and Bob McCartney before Lady Hermon. Eason is a hugely popular politician among more hard line unionists but he has not dominated the political landscape in the manner of Kilfedder, McCartney and Hermon.
Alliance and Farry saw their opportunity.
There were only four people on the ballot paper which was completed by Alan Chambers, for the UUP, and Frank Shivers, from NI Conservatives. It was a tough campaign but when all the ballots had been counted, Farry had triumphed with 45.2% of the vote, ahead of Easton’s 37.9%. He had a majority of 2,968 which left many in the Easton campaign fuming with the Ulster Unionists whose Chambers polled 4,936.
For Farry, a graduate of Queen’s University and an International Peace Scholar, it was a nervous moment when he first sat on the green benches of the House of Commons. “I had some knowledge of how parliament worked, so I wasn’t going into something alien as to the way things operate. However, you don’t fully appreciate it until you are there.”
But as Farry and the new Parliament were finding their feet a situation was developing that was to change the world forever – coronavirus. “We were only there two-and-a-half months when Covid emerged and that had major implications on how parliament was able to function,” he said.
After those initial first six weeks of lockdown, Westminster moved to a virtual working, before a hybrid model was put in place for voting purposes. But even without Covid, it was an unusual political term for the UK
“You are dealing with so many major issues, you are dealing with the fall out from Brexit and the moves of the United Kingdom to withdraw (from Europe).
“Events were overtaken by Covid and the cost of living crisis, energy bills and three Prime Ministers which wasn’t expected as the Conservatives had a significant majority. There have been a lot of crises internationally; Ukraine, the collapse of Afghanistan and the conflict in Gaza and the economy has gone through a turbulent situation.”
AS Rishi Sunak battles to shore up his government’s popularity before the general election – which many believe will be in November – Mr Farry has, as expected, been selected by his party to again contest the North Down seat, the only parliamentary seat held by Alliance.
This interview by the Spectator took place before the announcement that Col. Tim Collins will be standing for the Ulster Unionists. There had been discussions between all the unionist parties at various levels about the possibility of a united unionist candidate to take on Farry, probably independent Alex Easton.
The unveiling of Collins has changed the dynamic of the united candidate. The DUP, TUV and Orange Order, who have been heavily involved in the discussions, must now decide if they unite behind Easton or whether to put pressure on Easton to step aside to give Collins a clear run – even if they don’t like the way he has been parachuted into the constituency.
Farry is critical of electoral pacts saying they ‘removed choice rather than offering a positive alternative’, although he has come in for criticism for this stance given the decision by the Alliance Party to stand aside in North Down in 2001 which allowed Sylvia Hermon the space to defeat incumbent Bob McCartney. He said the decision was made with the greater good in mind, to shore-up pro-Agreement unionism in a constituency Alliance knew they could not win.
“In 2001, it wasn’t as much a pact as the Alliance Party deciding not to stand in a number of constituencies such as Upper Bann and West Tyrone. North Down was always a core area, so it was always going to have a bigger impact.
“It was after the Good Friday Agreement and the Assembly was still in the early days. The issue was whether or not pro-Agreement unionism was going to survive or not and what was happening in North Down with Lady Sylvia Hermon versus Bob McCartney was going to be fairly instrumental.
“We knew we wouldn’t win the seat but we knew if we contested the seat it would split the pro-Agreement vote and Bob McCartney would continue as an anti-Agreement MP. So we took a difficult but pragmatic decision. We wanted to do the best thing to allow power sharing to survive. Stormont collapsed in 2002 but hopefully we kept the show on the road for a big longer.”
Mr Farry said whatever the various unionist parties decide to do is a matter for them. “We would stress that people vote on a candidate and on the issues, rather than stopping someone being elected, which is a profoundly negative message.”
LOOKING back over his four years in Parliament, Farry says the high point, ‘where I have had the biggest impact’, was the negotiation of the £3.3bn financial package which helped restore the Assembly last week.
Farry says he was the first politician to raise the alarm about Northern Ireland’s dire financial situation and led the call for a new and improved financial package for the Executive.
“I knew our finances were in real difficulty and weren’t working,” he said. “I have been pushing that with the Chancellor and the Northern Ireland Office effectively for over a year. Initially I was told ‘don’t be silly’ but it has snowballed over the past three months’.
“We have talked about the £3.3bn funding package but this will just stabilise the finances for two years. We need to have a proper funding formula for Northern Ireland.
“There is now a recognition that Northern Ireland is underfunded and this could have massive consequences for people’s quality of life, for health and special education needs. It is by far the biggest issue to be involved in,” he said.
Farry has also been heavily involved in supporting refugees and asylum seekers who have sought safety in the borough as they fled conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Said Farry of his support those seeking asylum: “It is close to the heart of my values and this constituency to help people integrate and play a role in a wider society.”
ON the home front Farry says backing Bangor’s city status, supporting local schools’ integrated aspirations and securing the future of a huge GP practises were among the local achievements of his four years as an MP.
He highlighted the recent coronation of the coastal town as a city, marked by a special visit by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne, as one of the tangible things he has achieved in his term in office.
I have lobbied successfully for city status, that was a major achievement. While I appreciate there is still a lot of cynicism and Bangor is still going through a transition, it allows us to rebrand ourselves in different ways.”
The MP said he supported a number of levelling up bids for projects in the North Down area such as Queen’s Parade and Kilcooley Women’s Centre saying: “Looking at it pound for pound, I think North Down has done as well as any other area.”
Turning to another ‘work in progress’ Mr Farry welcomed the ‘gear change’ in support for integrated education with both Bangor Academy and Sixth Form College and Rathmore Primary School opting to transform.
Mr Farry said he and his party colleagues had also ’worked closely with the South Eastern Health Trust and the Department of Health to secure the future of Priory and Springhill GP surgeries’.
He stressed that it would have been ‘catastrophic’ if the surgeries, that provide GP services for 14, 525 patients in Holywood and Bangor, had closed their doors last year.
Despite the latest delay pushing Bangor’s long overdue seafront redevelopment back to this summer the North Down MP said he remained ‘optimistic’ for the newly crowned city’s future.
He said he was ‘eager’ to see the work formally start along the seafront but believed the city’s future no longer lay as a retail hub but as an arts and culture centre.
“I am optimistic for Bangor, it has to change to have a different future,” he said. “Queen’s Parade has been a major drag for us over the past three decades and that uncertainty hasn’t helped.”
He praised the efforts of the Open House Festival and Bangor Court House teams saying: “The number of events that are now happening are increasingly putting the city on the map. We are now being seen as a destination area.”
He said: “Once Queen’s Parade is developed this will provide a much better foundation for people to make investment decisions.”
One area that Farry and his party have come in for intense criticism is their backing for the permanent closure of the Bangor and Ards minor injuries units (MIUs). The South Eastern Health Trust closed the units in favour of a bigger MIU at the Ulster Hospital, claiming the close proximity to the major new emergency department would ensure patients had access to better services and doctors.
Farry and Alliance backed the proposal immediately but during the round of consultations it emerged the Trust’s most senior emergency doctor had for months been flagging up the fact that the new emergency department was too small for the number of patients it was being asked to treat. These shortcomings in the new department were a major driver in the decision to close the local MIUs, forcing patients to travel to the Ulster, something local politicians weren’t informed about before the medics reservations leaked out.
The new department has also been bedevilled by huge waiting times for patients and controversially, has been holding elderly patients in ambulances outside the A&E building, sometimes for up to 16 hours.
The Alliance Party deputy leader believes that axing the MIUs in Bangor and Ards was the right choice despite ongoing ‘teething problems’.
“The decision is one we stand by,” said Farry, saying he accepted there were always going to be ‘teething problems’ in a major transformation of a service.
He said their decision had been made on the ‘best clinical advice’ and stressed the health system needed to ‘change to be more efficient and effective.”
“We are in a major health crisis, our health service is more expensive to run than the rest of the United Kingdom and has less effective outcomes.”
He said ‘more difficult reforms’ would need to be made but it was ‘about ensuring we provide the best possible service to people’ and there were now ‘more more specialists on site who will provide a much better service to people’.
“I appreciate the travel (to the Ulster Hospital) can be an added inconvenience to people but for me the trade off is that people will get a much better service for that,” he said.
TURNING to the low points of his past term in office, Farry highlighted the challenges of travelling to and from London as well as the backdrop of the ongoing political instability of Northern Ireland as he sought to ‘get results for people’.
“Having to travel is time consuming and you are living on the road for a fair part of the week, it is a challenge. There is also the backdrop of the ongoing instability in Northern Ireland and it is not great for getting things done,” he said.
“Northern Ireland is struggling as a society; we have seen struggles across the United Kingdom and around the world but the challenges are more acute in Northern Ireland. At times in can be frustrating that you are not able to do more, to get issues resolved. You are pushing in a difficult climate to get results for people.”
For years the North Down parliamentary election attracted little attention amid other, more prominent battlegrounds across Northern Ireland. But this time around, given the unionist desire to remove the Alliance Party deputy leader, the inclusion of a high-profile UUP candidate and Farry’s own determination to win a second term, North Down is certain to be one to watch.
