Kate Hoey Quotes

British politician (born 1946)

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Catharine Letitia Hoey, Baroness Hoey (born 21 June 1946), known as Kate Hoey, is a Northern Irish politician who served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Home Affairs from 1998 to 1999 and Minister for Sport from 1999 to 2001. By the late 1970s, Hoey was active in the British Labour Party and served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Vauxhall from 1989 to 2019. On December 14 that year, Hoey announced she had left the Labour Party and became a life peer the following year.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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While I understand that Ireland was quite shocked at our decision to Leave, so much of the controversy over the border has been manufactured by it to try to keep Northern Ireland bound by EU regulations and different from the rest of the UK.

I don't fit into a mould.

Kate Hoey is an asset to the Labour Party. She has been a brave and principled fighter for what she believes, and yesterday’s announcement, though understandable, is regrettable. I wish her well.

[T]he tricolour is not my flag ... I genuinely don't feel Irish. Is there something wrong with that?

I was always very cynical about the European Union.

I'm pro-union. I would not dream of voting for Sinn Fein, I wouldn't dream of voting for the SDLP.

If Stormont goes back with the present Windsor Framework, they in fact would be almost like what happened during the war with the Vichy government, where all those [w:Member of the Legislative Assembly (Northern Ireland)|MLAs]] [Members of the Legislative Assembly] would be collaborators with a kind of colonial government.

I think we all kind of know how we got here, that Northern Ireland was sacrificed because it could have been that we weren’t going to get Brexit at all.

[The vote for the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election was] what we needed for stability because now the European Union knows that we're not going to revoke Article 50. We're not going to have a second referendum. We're going to get out, and they will have to change their attitude, too, to the negotiations. And we will get, I hope, within the next year a good free trade deal with the European Union. And of course, then we will be discussing with the United States to get an even closer relationship with you as well.

I personally couldn't vote for the Withdrawal Agreement because of Northern Ireland but I could understand many of my colleagues in the Leave campaign because they have to do it.

Then there is the crucial issue of the Irish border. If, in any deal, Northern Ireland is to be treated differently from the rest of the UK then anyone who believes in the Union could not possibly support that deal. No doubt there will be some flowery EU-speak designed to hide the true intention and we will be told that as it is never intended to be needed then we shouldn’t worry.

We can be a successful independent country like the United States, working, cooperating with the rest of the world.

[On Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK] I don't think anyone from a pro-union background should fear Keir Starmer becoming the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.

I’m pro-union, I’ll do anything to make sure that the United Kingdom has Northern Ireland as an integral part of it on the same terms as any other part of the United Kingdom when we leave the EU.

Taking foreign laws from a foreign legislature, governing much of our economy in Northern Ireland and keeping us in a foreign customs code whereby GB, Great Britain, our country, where our capital is, becomes a third country, becomes our foreign country – it’s just not acceptable.