"I offend therefore I am"
I'm just back from Stormont where Sammy Wilson emerged from a meeting with local bankers to defend his latest controversial comments about the local "racism industry". He has clashed with Patrick Yu of the NI Council on Ethnic Minorities who complained that remarks made by Sammy on the 91Èȱ¬'s Politics Show back in January could enable the incitement of racial hatred (the then Envoronment Minister had told my colleague Kevin Sharkey that local workers should be given preference in filling job vacancies).
Sammy hit back in typically trenchant form anti-racism campaigners of having a "vested interest" in sustaining the impression that racism is rife here in order to bolster their demand for government grants.
As was the case when he spoke out about climate change, Sammy's critics have once again risen to his latest challenge. Alliance's Anna Lo accuses him of using whilst the Greens' Steven Agnew says the DUP have shown a lack of concern about how ethnic minorities can be better included in society. He claims the DUP "are part of the cause of racism, not the solution" and concludes that "Mr. Wilson uses controversy to justify his own existence. Mr. Wilson's philosophy appears to be 'I offend therefore I am'".
No doubt Sammy would strenuously disagree - indeed when we were talking at Stormont he pointed out various people from other ethnic backgrounds whose causes he has personally championed. But his tone on these matters is strikingly different from others - whilst the Belfast Mayor Naomi Long for example has been hailingthe return of Roma families to Belfast as a good news story for the city, the Finance Minister has been expressing his concern, suggesting that they are only coming back to be exploited by "gangmasters".
UPDATE: I have now interviewed Patrick Yu at the Council for Ethnic Minorities, who points out that 75% of the groups in this sector get no government funding. He is scornful about the description of such groups as an "industry".
Patrick was keen to point out the way in which the continuing hold up in the Executive agreeing a Cohesion, Sharing and Integration policy is delaying an overall anti-racist strategy. The obstacles over CSI Belfast (as Channel 5 might call it) are more concerned with our home grown division and differences between unionists and nationalists over issues such as the "shared future" policy and equality, but its delay is having a knock on impact.
If the Executive had agreed such an anti-racist strategy would it have had any practical impact in tackling or averting the kind of problems we have seen in and around the Village area of Belfast? Or would it have just contributed to the mountain of paper work at Stormont?
I'm 
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