‘What is the point?’-Nesbitt asks dissidents

Mike Nesbitt spoke to the Sentinel whilst on a whistle-stop tour of Londonderry today (Thursday May 24) meeting grass roots party members and liaising with various organisations.

His comments came after another major security alert, the second in three days, last night saw residents evacuated from their homes in Creggan. A suspect device, later confirmed to be a hoax was discovered attached to a utility box close to St Mary’s Church at around 10pm. Evacuated residents were eventually allowed back into their homes at around 2am after bomb disposal experts carried out a controlled explosion.

This morning a 30-year-old man was charged with various terrorist related charges at Londonderry Magistrates Court following the discovery of what was described as a bomb factory in the Maureen Avenue area of Londonderry earlier in the week.

Mike Nesbitt said: “What is the point? What are they trying to achieve? If you go down to the Republic of Ireland, is everyone there happy with the state? Of course they are not.

“Essentially this has to do with economics. Go to Greece-people there are besides themselves with the regime being imposed on them. They don’t want austerity anymore. Go to France, Italy, Spain and Portugal and its the same. Nobody is happy with their government but the solution is not to take it out on your own people or to be negative or destructive-that’s very easy.

“The difficult bit is to be positive and come up with imaginative ways of getting us out of this global recession at which point we can have an intelligent debate about nationality, flags and emblems.

“But, for people in poverty, of which far too many of our people are including 28 per cent of all our children in Northern Ireland. Therefore what these dissidents are doing is a nonsense.”