The DUP is “continually denying” the outcome of the election in Northern Ireland, according to the first minister designate, Michelle O’Neill.
After the Northern Ireland secretary’s announcement on Friday that another assembly election would be held, O’Neill said the DUP had “failed to accept the outcome of the election” that took place in May and handed a landmark victory to Sinn Féin.
“We’ve already had an election but the outcome of the election is continually being denied by the DUP. I don’t think it’s lost on the wider public that they have difficulty in forming a government to be a deputy first minister to my mandate, which is to be first minister given the recent election results,” O’Neill told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday.
“It’s not lost on people that’s actually the real motivation here. But the DUP hide behind the issues of the [Northern Ireland] protocol.”
The DUP boycotted the power-sharing executive and the assembly after the election result, and said it wants to see the protocol overhauled before government is resumed.
The unionist party see the protocol, which puts checks on goods entering the region from Great Britain as part of post-Brexit arrangements, as a threat to Northern Ireland’s position in the UK and a step towards a united Ireland.
In a separate interview for the programme, the DUP leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, insisted: “This is not to do with who is the first minister.”
“This is about … unionists feeling that they have been made second-class citizens as a result of a protocol that diminishes and undermines our place in the United Kingdom,” he said.
“We never supported the protocol, we made clear it would harm Northern Ireland, it would create instability and so it has, and I welcome the commitment now of the EU to negotiate a new solution.”
O’Neill said the protocol was “a necessity and it’s here to stay”.
The deadline to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland expired at midnight on Thursday, which meant by law an election for a new assembly must be called within 12 weeks.
However, most politicians and analysts in the region said an election would do nothing to break the political deadlock.
“We shouldn’t have to have an election, because we have had had one, but unfortunately that election result has been disrespected,” O’Neill said. “Six months post that election, we have a state of limbo, with no government in place, no ministers in post and with nobody taking decisions in the interests of the people, and it’s just not acceptable.”
