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PeopleTranscript
00:00So Mervyn, how come you've come to Dariachi this year for the Twelfth?
00:04Well, all the demonstration feeders bid for who they want to speak and Dariachi picked
00:08me last year and so they were just lucky enough to get me.
00:13And obviously, it's been a difficult year for unionism, politically, the election wasn't
00:18too bad, but will politics feature heavily in your speech today?
00:23Ah, the speech will cover that, I have to say. You're right, it could have been a lot
00:26worse, the election. We started out with eight unionist MPs and we ended up with eight unionist
00:30MPs, so it could have been a lot worse, but there's a lot to improve on, there's a lot
00:35of lessons to be learned.
00:38Will unity amongst unionists be part of your message today?
00:41I think co-operation is a much better word than unity. Individual parties need to co-operate.
00:46I don't think unity would do unionism any good in that sense because people nowadays
00:50need a choice, a choice of parties with different principles, different policies, but one over
00:56riding concern for us is that they are unionist parties and that's where the co-operation
01:00needs to be, at the top level. If there's no negotiations about the union, we're united
01:06and that's unity and purpose.
01:07Where that sort of co-operation normally falls down is when it comes to picking candidates
01:11for seats. Should there be more agreed joint candidates?
01:16I think so. I think there needs to be work done now for the Assembly election that's
01:20coming up and of course there'll be differences in personalities, but we lose seats if we
01:26allow them to get in the way of unionist co-operation and I think it's important that parties sit
01:30down and the Orients were involved in doing it before the last election to try and get
01:34people to sit down, but it didn't work out. People have their own agendas and we see that
01:38as well, but certainly the institution will be encouraging unionist co-operation and the
01:42other thing we'll be doing is trying to fight the apathy. There's apathy out there amongst
01:45the union committee for a whole variety of reasons and we need to address those things.