POLICING DEBATE:THE CURRENT PSNI budget is £100 million short and any devolution of policing and justice must be properly financed, DUP Assembly member Ian Paisley junior said.
During a debate on policing, Mr Paisley said Northern Ireland had enough pressing concerns to be addressing at the moment, but "over the coming years" a number of key principles on policing must be established.
He recalled that the old unionist Stormont administration had control of justice and policing up until 1972 and that it was "right that unionists ought to be ambitious enough that we want one day in the future to regain control of this vital area of governance".
"We must maintain the position that we, as the largest single party and the dominant force in unionism, ought to have control over who gets any future justice and police portfolio," said Mr Paisley.
He said that the DUP had established a position where for "all time" the Assembly will by a weighted vote determine who the policing and justice minister should be - although Sinn Féin insists it has made no such agreement with the DUP.
"This means our choice of ministries is not affected by the allocation of this post, but we must ensure that we can veto who takes this position," he added.
"Finally, conference, we should insist that any devolution of policing and justice powers comes with a guarantee of the sums required to properly finance the police and the legal profession. This power must not be devolved if other services have to be made to suffer and pay for it," said Mr Paisley.
"The current police budget is over £100 million short and the justice budget is rarely even talked about by commentators, but the fact is the Northern Ireland legal aid bill is growing, and we must ensure that irrespective of devolution or otherwise, these areas of government are properly financed," he added.
Mr Paisley said the Executive and Assembly illustrated that Northern Ireland had prevailed after years of terror and could now emerge as a place that was politically stable and offered economic opportunity.
"Sinn Féin need to get their heads around the fact that when they signed up to the St Andrews agreement and a government with the DUP that they had signed away the prospect of ever uniting Ireland and have embraced a British state," he added.
