DUP MP Says Her Party Can Remove O’Neill as First Minister
“We have it within our gift to ensure that she is actually removed from that position,” Carla Lockhart said outside Drumcree Church, accusing Michelle O’Neill of “breaking the law flagrantly on the Garvaghy Road” and saying it “cannot be business as usual at Stormont”. Her own party leader has ruled out collapsing power-sharing.
The mechanism is the part that makes this a threat rather than a plan. Under the Stormont rules the DUP cannot remove a Sinn Féin first minister directly; the office falls only if the deputy first minister resigns. That is Emma Little-Pengelly, and both she and the party leader Gavin Robinson said over the weekend that they would not bring the institutions down. So the MP for Upper Bann is at odds with her own leadership, and when asked whether she still had confidence in it she declined to answer. The anger she describes is real enough: “They’re angry at the chief constable for allowing lawlessness to win, for allowing the mob to dictate,” and at Ms O’Neill as “this self-proclaimed ‘first minister for all’… thumbing her nose at unionism and at the Orange Order and at this community”. The sequence behind it: the Parades Commission cleared a restricted march along the Garvaghy Road for the first time in twenty-eight years, thousands of residents including Sinn Féin leaders blocked it, police stopped the parade, and the Northern Ireland Secretary then banned it outright on Friday. Ms O’Neill is among those who have received police letters about the protest and has said she was “proud” to stand with residents.