AN extraordinary amount of politicking surrounded Belfast City Council’s emergency meeting on the hunger strike by Palestine Action remand prisoners in England.

People Before Profit called the meeting with Sinn Féin and Green support – enough to secure a meeting, but not enough to pass a vote at the meeting, putting the SDLP and Alliance on the spot.

The proposed motion was watered down to calling on the government to negotiate with the prisoners, rather than to meeting their demands.

A reference was added to Belfast’s “sizeable Palestinian community” to make the motion locally relevant for legal purposes.

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It then passed with SDLP support, although that had scarcely been in doubt.

Alliance dealt with this by abstaining but blaming the DUP lord mayor for facilitating the meeting too quickly – in three days, when up to two weeks is allowed.

Others joined in this complaint, provoking the DUP to ask if it was really an emergency. More politicking will follow if unionists use the call-in procedure to have the vote overturned.

It would be interesting to know the true size of Belfast’s Palestinian population, on whose behalf all this supposedly took place.

In the 2021 census, 1,014 people in the city identified as “Arab” but no further breakdown is available. There were 87 Palestinian asylum seekers in the whole of Northern Ireland last year.

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