Peter Robinson (politician)
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Peter David Robinson (born 29 December, 1948) is a Democratic Unionist Party member of parliament for East Belfast. He is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the same constituency and is married to Iris Robinson.
After being elected to Castlereagh Borough Council, in Belfast's South-Eastern suburbs in 1977, he narrowly won election to the House of Commons in 1979, edging out the sitting MP, former Vanguard leader, and UUP candidate William Craig by 64 votes, with Alliance Party leader Oliver Napier 928 votes behind.
He was relected to the House of Commons in 1983, 1986, 1987, 1992, 1997 and 2001. In the last of these elections, his wife joined him there as Member for Strangford. Robinson is the longest serving Member of Parliament for any Belfast constituency since Parliamentary representation began after the Act of Union in 1800. He was elected to the consultative Northern Ireland Assembly of 1982-1986, topping the poll in East Belfast. He was one of the MPs to resign their seats in 1985 at protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
On 7 August, 1986, in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Robinson led an 'invasion party' of 500 loyalists into the village of Clontibret, County Monaghan, in the Republic of Ireland. The loyalists entered the Garda Síochána (the Irish police) station in the village and physically assaulted two Garda officers. Robinson was later arrested. He pleaded guilty to unlawful assembly and was fined £17,500 in a Drogheda court because of the incident. As a result, Robinson briefly resigned from the deputy leadership of the DUP.
He was elected to the Northern Ireland Forum of 1996, and again topped the poll in East Belfast in the 1998 Assembly Elections. He served as Regional Development Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive from 21 November, 1999 but resigned on 27 July, 2000, then served again from 24 October, 2001, when the devolved institutions were restored, until resigning on 11 October, 2002, shortly before the executive and the Assembly were suspended.
Robinson espouses a populist, statist form of Ulster Loyalism. He is strongly in favour of capital punishment and opposed to European integration. Nonetheless he is in favour of state intervention and socialist measures which are popular with his largely working-class constituents. While Regional Development Minister he introduced free public transport for senior citizens, probably his most astute political move. He also approved several vital road projects in the West of Northern Ireland.
Robinson is undoubtedly intelligent but often deeply controversial. While he has been Deputy Leader of the DUP behind Ian Paisley since 1980, he has a unique character and has an independent style. He is regarded as the leader of the urban, secular, working-class wing of the DUP (as opposed to Paisley's rural, religious fundamentalist base), and the architect of the DUP's development in recent years of a slick electoral and media machine. He is also seen as a leader of the realo tendency within the Party which acknowledges that it must at some point come to an accommodation with Sinn Féin although he remains a hate figure for Nationalists.
Robinson is in many ways the natural successor to Paisley, although having waited so long in the wings some feel he has missed his moment, or that an alternative candidate such as Nigel Dodds might be more acceptable to rural evangelicals within the Party.
External link
- Peter Robinson official site (http://www.peterrobinson.org/default.asp)
- Guardian Unlimited Politics - Peter Robinson MP (http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/0,9290,-4478,00.html)
- TheyWorkForYou.com - Peter Robinson MP (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/peter_robinson/belfast_east)sv:Peter Robinson (politiker)