Stormont, Northern Irish Political Parties (Day 6)

My first true day at Stormont began on Thursday, June 7th. After making the 1.5 hour hike up to Belfast, Basil McCrea picked us up once again and brought us from the Europa bus station in Belfast to the main building at Stormont. Interesting side note - the Europa Hotel in Belfast is known as the most bombed hotel in Europe as the building was bombed several times during the Troubles.

At Stormont, we began by eating breakfast down at the canteen. Stormont is always incredibly busy and it was interesting to be down at the canteen because people from all different levels of government - administrators, MLPs, etc. - all stop in there to eat.

Soon thereafter, my housemate and I met Peter Hall, the Head of Outreach and Education for the Northern Ireland Assembly. He chatted with us over tea about our lives back home and about future career plans. Peter introduced us to a really nice woman at Stormont who gave us a tour of the building and who showed us the Senate Chamber and the Assembly Chamber. The Senate Chamber is currently just used for committee meetings (as there is no senate). There were two historic paintings in the room, and the more recent painting is a portrait of all the MLPs painted by Noel Murphy. The painting is from a few years back, but it was fun to take a look at the painting and to try to pick out the MLPs that we recognized.

It was also pretty neat to see the Assembly Chamber, where all of the big decisions are made today!

After the tour, my housemate and I were invited to sit in on a presentation that was given by the Assembly Education Service to law students who had come from Duquesne University in the US. The presentation was focused on instructing the audience on the differences between the 6 political parties in Northern Ireland. Leaders from each of the political parties actually came in and gave a summary of what was important to their party and at the end of each talk there was a brief Q and A period. It was an amazing learning opportunity for us because I had been a bit confused on the differences between the political parties in Northern Ireland, but hearing information directly from the political parties really cleared a lot of that up!

Just in case you're wondering, the 6 political parties are: Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sinn Fein, Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Alliance Party, and the Green Party. The Democratic Unionist Party is the largest and Sinn Fein isn't too far behind. Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic Labour Party both are nationalist parties. The Alliance Party is really interesting because it advocates for cooperation between nationalist and unionist communities.

The presentation was just so eye opening and the Assembly Education Service did a really effective job in my opinion of presenting bias-free information to the public and in making the presentation easy for a lay person to understand.