British, Irish Governments Plan for Talks
By Shawn Pogatchnik
Monday June 26, 2006 6:01 PM
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - The British and Irish governments plotted a course Monday for top-level negotiations later this week in Northern Ireland, where efforts to revive a Catholic-Protestant administration have failed to get anywhere.
Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern and Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, discussed the impasse at Hain’s official residence, Hillsborough Castle near Belfast.
Hain and Ahern said later their governments had completed a confidential agenda for Thursday, when the British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, will oversee Belfast talks involving the four local parties that are supposed to form a power-sharing administration.
A previous coalition fell apart in October 2002 over an Irish Republican Army spying scandal inside the government. But the IRA disarmed last year and declared its 1997 cease-fire would be permanent - moves designed to resurrect cooperation between Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party and Protestants.
The two premiers - whose close cooperation underpinned the province’s landmark Good Friday accord - last traveled together to Northern Ireland in April, when they unveiled a joint push for reviving power-sharing, the central goal of the 1998 peace deal. They ordered the long-mothballed Northern Ireland Assembly to reconvene and gave its 108 members a Nov. 24 deadline to elect an administration - or lose their jobs for good.
But the major Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists, says it will not work with Sinn Fein, which represents most Catholics in Northern Ireland, until the IRA disbands and Sinn Fein accepts the authority of the province’s police force.
“There will be no quick fixes with IRA-Sinn Fein,'’ said Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley in a statement addressed to Blair. “There will be no compromise of our democratic position and there will be no surrender to terrorists.'’
Paisley said the IRA had retained some firearms and was still involved in criminal activities, while Sinn Fein leaders were failing to “encourage their community to help the police in the fight against crime and terror.'’
Earlier, in comments explicitly aimed at the Democratic Unionists, Hain said Northern Ireland voters expected all politicians “to do the jobs to which they were elected,'’ not “to pack up and go home to another life after midnight on Nov. 24.'’
Dermot Ahern emphasized that both governments were committed to that deadline, even if failure meant an end to power-sharing efforts for years.
“We expect people to come up to the mark,'’ he said. “Nov. 24 is sacrosanct.'’
While the Democratic Unionists refuse to cooperate, the British government under Hain has pressed ahead with cutbacks and reforms in Northern Ireland that are often widely unpopular, such as plans to raise business taxes, abolish elite grammar schools and introduce fees for water services. Hain says if residents do not like what he is doing, they should put him out of a job by taking control of these policy areas themselves.
Hain also has stressed Britain’s interest in coordinating policies in Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic, a part of the 1998 peace deal designed to appeal to Catholic leaders, who seek the eventual unification of Ireland.
On Monday, in the latest such step, Hain and Dermot Ahern announced that all people aged at least 65 in both parts of Ireland would be provided free travel on all bus and train services throughout the island beginning in April 2007.
Free travel for senior citizens was introduced in the Republic of Ireland more than three decades ago, and in Northern Ireland in 1995, but until now travelers were able to get free tickets only for bus and train services that started within their own country, with no free connections possible inside the other part of Ireland. The new plan will remove all those restrictions.
