Paul Givan in Government: A Member-funded Report
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On 10 November 2025, Minister for Education Paul Givan faced a no confidence vote in Stormont brought by People before Profit because of his trip to Occupied West Bank paid for by the Israeli embassy. 47 MLAs voted in favour (Sinn Fein, SDLP, Alliance PBP) with 33 against (DUP, UUP, TUV), but the vote failed to attract cross community support and therefore, did not pass.
The no confidence vote was held in response to the Minister’s visit to a school in the occupied West Bank at the invitation of and paid for by the Israeli government at the end of October 2025. The trip brought his tenure as Education Minister into serious disrepute. Thousands of Palestinian children have been murdered by the Israeli military after two years of genocide - with no schools or adequate infrastructure left to return to. Many people were outraged by how Paul Givan had used his capacity as Education Minister and the resources of Department of Education to whitewash and normalise Israel’s genocide and occupation. In September 2025, only two months before the trip, UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Act Now members and others took action to hold Paul Givan to account. From Fermanagh and South Tyrone to North Antrim, more than 2,000 Act Now members sent over 10,000 emails to local MLAs calling on them to support the motion of no confidence. Initially, Alliance and SDLP were reluctant to support the motion. But after the volume of emails their MLAs received, it reached the threshold of 30 MLAs needed to bring the motion of no confidence to the Assembly. Ultimately, the motion did not receive the cross-community support required to pass a vote of no confidence and so the motion fell. After the motion, Paul Givan “told members in the assembly the motion was a "toxic mix of antisemitism, anti-unionism and hypocrisy".
In the wake of this, Act Now launched a fundraiser for an investigation into Paul Givan’s track record in government in line with the Ministerial Code. To date, 69 members donated to this fundraiser. Without them, this report would not be possible.
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