Friday, 11 December, 1998
Sunday, 13 December, 1998
Monday, 14 December, 1998
Friday, 18 December, 1998
Write to the prisoners this Christmas
This Christmas there will still be republican POWs unable to spend the festive season with their loved ones. These political prisoners should be released immediately or - pending their release - given parole for Christmas to enable them to spend time with their families.
It is important that our readers do not forget them. Write to them, send them cards and campaign with Saoirse for their release.
ENGLAND (Long Martin)
LONG KESH. There are approximately 90 republican POWs left in Long Kesh. 21 of them will not be allowed to go home for Christmas:
MAGHABERRY:
PORTLAOISE:
(NOTE: It is not known (as of today) how many - if any - of the prisoners in Portlaoise will be released for Christmas.)
USA:
Richard Johnston, 17422-038, Allenwood FCI, P.O. Box 1000, Whitedeer P.A. 17887.You can support the prisoners and help in the campaign for their release:
Addresses:
Home Office, Cleland House Page Street London. Tel: 0171 217300. Dr. Marjorie Mowlam, Castle Buildings, Stormont, Belfast. Portlaoise Prison, Portlaoise, Co. Laoise. Department of Justice, 72 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2. Long Kesh Prison, Lisburn, Co. Antrim. Tony Blair,10 Downing Street London. Long Lartin Prison, Worcester, England.
Held to ransom by an arrogant, armed minority
Editorial - Sunday Business Post
Arrogant and armed to the teeth. It is a measure of the arrogance which afflicts unionism that the UUP leader David Trimble should use the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to erect further obstacles to progress in the northern peace process. Trimble is an unlikely recipient of the peace prize, given the divisive role he has played in northern politics over the last 30 years.
But his acceptance speech in Oslo proved, if proof was needed, that he is a dismal little politician with little or nothing to contribute to the creation of a better future for the people of Ireland.
The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) commands the support of a little over one fifth of the electorate in Ireland's six north eastern counties. It would appear that within this constituency, Trimble commands the support of about half of UUP voters and that he is politically immobilised as a result.
Thus, in strict mathematical terms, the future of more than five million people on this island is being gravely affected by a party and a leader who command the support of only a tiny fraction of the voters on this island.
The two sovereign governments in Dublin and London have shown a remarkable degree of tolerance in recent times in permitting such an unrepresentative grouping to defy the will of the peoples of all-Ireland and of Britain too.
It is no accident that the entire future of the peace process is being held to ransom over the issue of paramilitary weapons. Since the foundation of the northern state, unionism has been obsessed with weapons. The unionist population of the six counties is armed to the teeth.
Previous governments at Stormont, under unionist control, were incapable of creating a normal civilian police force. Instead they created a quasi-military police force, drawn from one community only, and armed with a bizarre array of weapons which would be more appropriate to an army in the field of battle.
The northern state provided gun licences to politically supportive persons in respect of an extraordinary range of weaponry, with some civilians entitled to hold machine guns, allegedly for the purpose of culling otters and such like. As of now, one hundred and thirty thousand licensed firearms are privately held-the equivalent of one firearm for every three adult males within the unionist community.
Despite the fact that the Catholic population has been visited by grotesque sectarian murder in every generation since the foundation of the northern state, the UUP now wants to strip the nationalist community of any weapons it might possess as a precondition to any progress on the political front.
Trimble drones on about what he calls "decommissioning" against a backdrop of continuing sectarian murders of Catholic civilians, the most recent being the casual execution of Mr Service in Belfast at Halloween.
This year was ushered in by a series of quite casual assassinations of Catholic civilians, for which nobody has been brought to account by the unionist police force.
Yet the limited number of weapons held by the IRA is being used to block all progress towards political structures which might command the support of both communities.
Obvious questions arise. Will the two sovereign governments permit this weak little man to continue with his prevarication indefinitely?
He shows no sign of being willing to confront the backward elements within his own party or of demonstrating even rudimentary leadership qualities. The time is fast approaching when the two governments will have to look to someone else to move the situation forward.
In the meantime, since decommissioning is envisaged over two years as part of the Belfast Agreement, the two government should explain what sort of arrangements are to be put in place to protect innocent civilians from murderous sectarian attacks in coming years.
© 1998 The Sunday Business Post, 27-30 Merchants Quay, Dublin 8, Tel 353 1 6799777, Email: info@sbpost.ie
Trimble incapable of a noble gesture
By Tom McGurk - Sunday Business Post
What a sad little man David Trimble is. So many of us watched Thursday's ceremony in Oslo in the hope that we might see some sign from him of the imagination and generosity that might transform all our lives, unionist and nationalist, on this island.
Far from hearing an address worthy of 'Urbi et Orbi', we got what sounded like the speech on prize day at Portadown Tech.
Yet again, David closed one eye and pretended to be king. What was masquerading as a down-to-earth practical number from the 'Ulster British' constituency, whose tradition, according to David, "produced the first vernacular Bible in the language of the common people" was actually an artifice of carefully disguised polemic floating on a subtext of the snide and the impudent.
Even his Nobel fellow-recipient John Hume, on whose back our 'Hero of Drumcree 95' had actually piggybacked to Oslo, wasn't safe. David's put-down about "the kind of rhetoric which substitutes vapour for vision" wasn't lost on anybody. David's little jokes about not forgetting to take the cheque, or having to sing for his supper in order to pick it up, left more than the stone-faced Norwegians shifting in their chairs.
It was a moment, though, when they began to see what we have had to put up with for so long in Ireland, a moment too when they must have secretly blessed the tides of history which conspired to send this endemically enfeebled part of the English-speaking imagination in a westward direction and away from them.
Not satisfied with that, David then went on to produce his intellectual and cultural antecedents, commenting that "we(presumably his British Ulster folk) are inheritors of that intellectual tradition that encourages us to identify with the cultural alliance of English-speaking peoples and share their political interests." I'm not sure who wrote the speech, although there are echoes of Eoghan Harris in it-not least in that it did for the Nobel occasion what Twink did once for a Fine Gael Ard Fheis.
But with sentiments like this, David was being sold not only a pup, but more likely a mangy cure. What on earth does this statement mean? That the 'cultural alliance' of English-speaking peoples excludes the intellectual and epistemological input of those who don't speak English? That there are certain cultural matters invisible to those who don't speak English? Or even more bizarre, that there are those who belong to the English-speaking peoples and who would not be seen dead sharing David's notion of political interests? Among all the polite semiotics of the occasion, such a statement probably passed most by or was indulged as a former university law lecturer assuming some bogus gravitas for the occasion.
But for all that, it deserves to be taken, in the cold light of the day after, on its own xenophobic energy. To somehow dress up what David calls the 'Ulster British' representation of the 'intellectual traditions of the English-speaking peoples' in Ireland as a progressive and enlightened force in that cultural tradition certainly needs taking to task.
One has only to witness the increasing depth of despair in the English-speaking capitals of London, Washington and Dublin at the antics and attitudes of the 'Ulster British' to see this.
Indeed, what would the citizens of post-liberal, post-modernist, multi-racial Britain make of David's own Orange Lodge of the Co Armagh division were they to join in the Lord Mayor's parade in London, or were some of the 'Kick the Pope' bands invited to gig at the Chelsea Flower Show? Even a cursory historical analysis of Irish unionists will show how, time and again, they were to the front in the political forces that opposed the sovereignty of parliament, the spread of universal adult suffrage, right down to their post-war efforts in 1946 to oppose the full introduction of Britain's National Health Service to the North.
Nor could David leave Oslo without a mention of the Ulster nationalists. Did he take a unique opportunity to attempt to mend fences, to recognise what was wrong in the past, to offer a new beginning for all in the future? Did he even take the opportunity to say something that might at least encourage us to wish him well in the future and allow us to turn there with at least a little more hope?
I find it difficult to discern any of that in his words. He said: "Ulster unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down."
So there you are: what an ungrateful bunch of bastards we were! Were it not for David's good folk, we would have been homeless and probably even colder. (Come to think of it, does this explain unionism's traditional reluctance to give houses to Catholics, or even Captain Terence O'Neill's countering liberal unionist argument that if you gave Catholics houses they would in fact learn to live like Protestants and not have so many children?)
I will comment no further. Perhaps David's sentiments on this matter are perhaps best left to the mercies of the parents of the three little Quinn brothers in Ballymoney, who know a thing or two about the good old Ulster British traditions of house-burning.
Sadly, at the close of a year which politically promised so much, we face the new one with much chastened ambitions. As David explained in Oslo, we must take it all very slowly. Presumably then, day by day, each step forward must seem to be two steps back. That David and his problems with his political imagination and his backwoodsmen are being endlessly indulged by London and Dublin, seems obvious to everyone except him.
How long will this continue? How many in the political think-tanks who prepare the situation papers are already convinced that though unionists are sort of on Blair's peace train, we will have to head off now for our destination while they sort out whether they are passengers or stowaways.
Either way, unionists' refusal to play political ball must now be confronted by our moving on without them. I suspect that London and Dublin are aware that because Trimble can't deliver enough unionists anyway, even if he tried, the decision may already have been taken. Not a moment too late.
© 1998 The Sunday Business Post, 27-30 Merchants Quay, Dublin 8, Tel 353 1 6799777, Email: info@sbpost.ie
Decommissioning a 'threat to ceasefire'
By Michael O'Toole, Dublin Correspondent - The Irish News
FORMER taoiseach Albert Reynolds yesterday warned that failure to implement the Good Friday agreement in full could have serious long term consequences for the IRA ceasefire.
Mr Reynolds, who five years ago today signed the Downing Street Declaration with then prime minister John Major, also said the decommissioning issue was being used to keep nationalists of all hues out of power in Northern Ireland.
Mr Reynolds, who was one of the key architects of the peace process while taoiseach between 1992 and 1994, said there could be "very serious consequences" if the vacuum created by non-implementation of the Mitchell deal continued.
Mr Reynolds told the Irish News: "Here we are eight months after the Good Friday agreement and it is not being implemented.
"And the longer it has gone on the more undermining there has been.
"Rather than building trust, it is mistrust that has been built."
Mr Reynolds said there was a perception that unionists " are not prepared to implement the agreement which will give Sinn Fein a place in the executive they are returning to the bugbear of decommissioning.
"It is an old hand that is being used again as another precondition to stop Sinn Fein getting onto the executive.
"It was used before as a stalling tactic.
"The fact that the north-south bodies and the executive have not been set up all creates the suspicion that a lot of unionists are not for real."
He said the decommissioning impasse brought about the end of the first ceasefire and warned: "We are heading down that same road again." He also said that decommissioning was too focused on republican guns. But he added: "The most important part of decommissioning has already taken place that's that the guns are silent and nobody is using them."
© 1998 The Irish News Ltd., 113-117 Donegall Street Belfast, Northern Ireland, Tel: +44 (0) 1232 322226, Email: Internet@irishnews.com
The torture of detainees in the Six Counties
As darkness fell on the evening of August 9 1971, Mary Davey was fearing the worst. Earlier that day she had arrived after working nightshift at the local geriatric unit to find the isolated farmhouse which was her family home deserted. The front door was lying open and her husband John and four year old daughter Maria were missing. The RUC could tell her nothing. Mary asked specifically about the child. No child had been ‚lifted' the RUC assured her. Neighbours organised a search party. They combed adjacent fields, ditches and rivers, but nothing was found.
Brutality, be it systematic torture, inhumane and degrading treatment or simply indifference to the arbitrary distress inflicted upon those their captors have already dismissed as less than fully human, has always been part of the nationalist experience of British occupation in the North.
Little Maria Davey had been sleeping when British soldiers brandishing sub machine guns and rifles had burst into her bedroom. It was 5am and all over the Six counties hundreds of nationalists were being dragged from their beds. With his hands tied behind his back John Davey could only wait as his youngest child struggled to dress herself. The soldiers shouted at her to "hurry up". In the back of a British army jeep, Maria screamed and begged as she was forcibly separated from her father. No one cared about the impact of being held alone, under armed guard, in an all male barracks by foreign soldiers on a small Irish child. No one thought it important to inform Mary Davey that her baby daughter had been taken, let alone where she was being held. For eighteen hours, Maria was simply "missing". During Operation Demetrius 342 people were arrested in a single morning, the oldest was 78-year-old Liam Mulholland from Belfast, the youngest was Maria Davey of Maghera. For over 30 years the British government has presided directly over the systematic ill treatment and torture of Irish people within the north of Ireland. The techniques employed and the specific political agenda for which they were employed changed over time but the horror and suffering of the ordinary people whose repression Britain demanded, remained the same. Out of a population of 60,000 northern nationalists, hundreds of thousands of people have been raided, arrested and detained, yet only a handful of their stories has ever been told. As the Patten Commission considers the future of the RUC, An Phoblacht considers the experience of detainees in the Six counties.
In his book "State Violence" Fr. Raymond Murray identifies 1971 as a watershed in his life. "Political prisoners who had been ill treated and tortured in Palace barracks and Girdwood Park barracks were imprisoned in Armagh jail where I was chaplain. I saw the horrific marks on their bodies. I experienced the blatant cover up of this illegal and immoral behaviour. Directly and indirectly, the army, police, doctors, civil administration and government were all involved in this criminal action." For most northern nationalists, the systematic ill treatment and torture of detainees began with internment. In a trawl for information, internees were subjected to sustained brutalisation, carried out by British soldiers, culminating in the ordeal of the "hooded" men. A form of interrogation in which brutal beatings were supplemented with sensory deprivation in which the victim was denied sleep, food and water, forced to stand spread-eagled against a wall, hooded and subjected to ‚white noise'.
By 1973, with the introduction of Diplock non jury courts, the central arena of torture shifted away from British army barracks into RUC interrogation centres. The sanction of convictions based on forced confessions became the driving force behind brutal interrogations in centres throughout the Six counties but most notoriously, in Castlereagh. Acquittal rates dropped from over a half to a third of cases by 1981. Over 90% of defendants appearing in Diplock courts had ‚confessions' against them. In almost 80% of all cases prosecution evidence relied solely on forced ‚confession' evidence. In almost thirty years since the introduction of Diplock courts over 10,000 northern nationalists have been subjected to the conveyor belt ‚justice' of brutal interrogations, forced confessions and arbitrary conviction in non jury courts. In 1976, a secret directive by the then RUC Chief Kenneth Newman gave interrogators a virtual license to torture. Within less than a year, thousands of nationalists were being arrested and interrogated in detention centres, with over 1,700 subsequently convicted. But by 1977 information about ill treatment was already beginning to leak into the public arena.
On March 2 1977 the BBC screened a special Tonight programme on interrogation methods in the Six counties. Bernard O Connor a school teacher from Enniskillen was one of two detainees interviewed by the programme makers. During a four day ordeal O Connor was repeatedly beaten, humiliated and choked into unconsciousness. O Connor describes the being kicked, punched and made to do press-ups, he continues, "finally they decided that it might be even better if I took off my clothes. So I was told to take my trousers off. They then told me to take my underpants off. They then told me to take the rest of my clothes off and I did so, leaving me naked...The track suit top which I was wearing was taken off me and put down over my head .. with the arms tied around my neck. My nose was closed off with their fingers and my mouth sealed by another hand. I couldn't breathe. I heard the older man say "Choke the bastard." The programme concluded medical evidence was consistant with O Connors' description of ill treatment.
In January 1978 the British government was found guilty of violating Article 3 of the European Court of Human Rights on two counts. A report by Amnesty International detailed "maltreatment of suspected terrorists by the RUC" and called for a public inquiry. The volume of evidence became so great that two RUC doctors felt compelled to resign. In March 1979 Robert Irwin, Belfast's forensic medical officer refuted claims by RUC Chief Newman that injuries sustained by detainees were self inflicted. Irwin threatened to reveal the records of 160 detainees ill treated in RUC interrogation centres. Two days later the British government published it's own Bennet Report, a partial admission of the truth but the torture continued. By the 1980's the RUC had perfected torture which "left no marks".
In February 1988 Brian Gillen, one of 16 men detained during raids in Belfast was the subject of a writ of Habeas Corpus following medical evidence of severe ill treatment. On release Brian was to give a graphic account of his experience. It was an experience which would be echoed time and time again by other detainees in the years that followed. A clear pattern of the new torture techniques being deployed by the RUC began to emerge. One detainee described his ordeal. "One of them would slap me hard on the back of the head just around the base of the skull. He would keep this up for long periods. after several minutes of this treatment you get a bursting headache. They would slap you with their palms on both ears at the same time. This left you with ringing sound in your ears."
For women detainees, brutalisation was often compounded with sexual abuse. In June 1991 Geraldine O Connor was arrested and taken to Castlereagh. "One in the brown suit put his elbow on my thigh and the elbow went up my leg to the groin. He was rubbing his nose against my nose, putting his arm around me and settling his head on my shoulder. The other man was rubbing his hands up and down my thighs and asking me did it turn me on. In another interview the RUC man squeezed my lips and kissed me, "Do you fancy a quickie even though she is so ugly, he said."
By the early 1990's the RUC were specifically targeting young people. "They were the worst five days of my life, there were times I thought they were going to kill me and times I wished I was dead," recounted one teenager. In August 1991 young people in the Beechmount, Ballymurphy and St James area of West Belfast were arrested and brutalised during interrogation. The mother of one Margaret Morgan described her son's ordeal. "James was interrogated for hours at a time by teams of RUC members. He was repeatedly beaten and kicked. He was humiliated, degraded and sexually assaulted. James was repeatedly slapped on the back of the head. I saw James five days after he was taken from the house. I hardly recognised him he looked so bad. He was very blue and could hardly walk. He just didn't look like my child." 19-year -old James Morgan later collapsed in his cell. He was left to lie in his own excrement for two days before being taken to hospital where he was considered so seriously ill that he was given the Last Rites.
One group of detainees whose experiences have been ignored is those placed under house, or room arrest during raids by the British army and RUC. Detention is within the detainee's home and the duration of the arrest is relatively short, usually a matter of hours rather than days, but the impact of what is often a traumatic ordeal can last for months, even years. In the last 30 years hundreds of thousands of nationalist families have been placed under house arrest during raids. In one four month period in the late 1980's over 6,000 nationalist homes were raided.
A raid is a violent violation of a space most usually associated as a place of safety. For many children, it is the ultimate erosion of their sense of security. Those held during raids not only suffer the psychological trauma of watching the destruction of their personal property but often endure violent assault and verbal abuse as well. Jacqueline Donnelly was in the bath when in November 1989 a raiding party smashed through the front windows and doors of her mother's home. "I heard my daughter screaming from the bathroom. She was having a bath but managed to pull a shirt on before the door was kicked in. She was kicked, punched and thrown downstairs. She had given birth only 14 days earlier and they kicked her so hard in the stomach her pelvic bone was badly bruised and she needed hospital treatment."
Detention during a raid is often accompanied by malicious acts of cruelty by the raiders. During a particularly vindictive raid in April 1990 on the Andersonstown home of Lucy Murray, the raiding party mutilated and killed two pet rabbits in front of three children. The rabbits were kicked to and fro as members of the raiding party played ‚football' until bloody and disfigured the animals died. A year after the raid, Lucy's youngest child, three year old Niamh, was still traumatised. "Niamh was very distressed after the raid. She began to have nightmares. She would wake up screaming. She began bed-wetting and refusing to go to bed alone or sleep in her own room. She became very dependent. She won't play with other children in the street. Most of the time she just wants to sit on my knee."
As in other forms of detention, when the person detained is female, sexual abuse can often accompany other forms of brutalisation. In 1992, a young woman from Poleglass was placed under room arrest for several hours. With half a dozen heavily armed soldiers and RUC officers standing ‚guard', the young mother was forced to watch the obscene antics of a British soldier outside her front window, while his colleagues commented on his sexual prowess and speculated on what the young woman of the house might "need".
By the early 1990s the ill treatment and torture of detainees was once again hitting the headlines and attracting the attention of human rights organisations, most notably Amnesty International. In the summer of 1991 Amnesty published a special report on the British government's abuse of human rights in the Six counties citing a number of specific cases of ill treatment and torture of detainees. Within a month of the report, Amnesty was to take the unprecedented step of issuing an International Urgent Order to protect a young Belfast teenager, Damien Austin who had suffered severe mental and physical abuse in Castlereagh. The eyes of the world were suddenly focused firmly on the Six counties. The Norwegian based Helsinki Watch repeated allegations that physical ill treatment during in interrogation in the north of Ireland was widespread. A group of British lawyers went even further, a report by the Haldane Society identified nine specific techniques of ill treatment and concluded torture during interrogation was being systematically employed and not "as the British government claims simply due to the misconduct of a few rogue RUC interrogators."
In November 1991 the British were summoned to appear before the United Nations Committee against Torture to answer serious allegations lodged by the Amnesty International and the Six County based Committee for the Administration of Justice. Only a year before Britain had been forced to derogate from the European Court of Human Rights. The public humiliation was set to continue. In 1994 the British sent a team of top civil servants to answer further allegations of ill treatment and torture at the UN. The committee remained unimpressed and ordered the closure of Castlereagh, immediate access to legal representation for detainees and the video recording of interrogations. The British government declined but the pressure continues. At a UN hearing earlier this year the British government again faced international condemnation on its record of treatment of detainees in the North of Ireland.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To mark the occasion British television screened, "In the name of the father", the story of the arbitrary arrest, brutal interrogation and false conviction of the Guildford Four. The screening was a small recognition of the suffering inflicted on Irish people by the British state over the past thirty years. A chink in the armour of denial which continues to overshadow the current peace process. In the interests of peace and reconciliation the testimony of pain endured by northern nationalists urgently needs to be acknowledged and addressed. After the assassination of American President John Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, whose dress was covered in her husband's blood was asked if she wanted to change. She replied in the negative, "let them see the horror," she said.
Orange Hardliners bomb Pub as Drumcree tension escalates
The Orange Volunteers, a fundamentalist Protestant terror group lined to the Orange Order, last night bombed a pub on the picturesque shores of Lough Neagh in County Antrim. The re-emergent group claimed it had been an attempt to murder a leading IRA member.
A typical mix of Protestant and Catholic customers had been drinking at McKenna's bar an hour before closing when it was rocked by the no-warning explosion. Those inside were shocked but escaped injury as the force of the blast shattered windows, leaving a crater outside the front door.
A second claim was later made by the Red Hand Defenders, another loyalist group. Several recent attacks in the Belfast area have been claimed by both, although the two groups are understood to be one and the same.
The attack has left nationalists across the North fearing for their safety as a tense holiday period begins. Further violence is thought likely at a rally called by the Orange Order in Portadown on Saturday. Loyalist supporters are expected to step up their sectarian attacks and intimidation of besieged nationalist residents in Portadown and Belfast over the Christmas period.
Following the breakdown of proximity talks between nationalist residents of the Garvaghy Road and the Orange Order to end the ongoing crisis over Orange Order marches in Portadown, Sinn Fein's Mid Ulster MP Martin McGuinness accused the Orangemen of "showing little respect" for the nationalists and for the broader peace process.
"After six months of living under siege the nationalist people of Garvaghy Road were entitled to expect that Christmas would be free from the fear an intimidation that they have experienced every day since July," said McGuinness. It was clear even before yesterdays talks that the Orange Order neither respect the people of Garvaghy Road nor their elected representatives. Why else would they insist that the talks are indirect instead of face to face?" LEAFLET Meanwhile, unacknowledged links between the Protestant Orange Order and the Orange Volunteers were further revealed today.
In a statement published in an Orange Order commemorative booklet, the Orange Volunteers outline its "aims, policies and objectives"
The objectives of the group include a threat to "carry out such actions as may be necessary" in order to "defend and support and protect the loyalist people of Northern Ireland". The document, suffused with fundamentalist religious rheteric, goes on: "The Orange Volunteers will work and fight without tie or bond with the help of Almighty God to maintain Northern Ireland's position as an integral part of the United Kingdom".
The document states the group would work with other loyalists to acheive these aims and concludes: "We will fight it out, God give us men - a time like this demands great hearts, strong minds, true faith and willing hands..."
Mr McGuinness said the Orange Order's activities were heightening tension across the six counties at a time of intensive talks toward the goal of ending the conflict. He called for a moratorium on disputed parades through nationalist neighbourhoods.
"The only way the issue of contentious marches can be resolved is through face to face dialogue between residents and the Orange Order. The Orange Order should immediately declare a moratorium on all their planned marches for the Portadown area as a gesture of their stated willingness to find a solution to the ongoing problem."
Flash: Deal reached on new political structures
The outline structure of new Irish political institutions were agreed early today in a deal which reinforced the peace process. While much work remains to be done before the new structures are up and running, the deal has ended the immediate threat to the peace process.
Unionists and nationalists agreed early today that there should be 10 government departments in the new northern power-sharing executive, and six all-Ireland implementation bodies.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams MP gave a qualified welcome to the agreement. He said while it fell short of fulfilling all Sinn Fein's objectives it cleared the way and showed that "progress is possible".
Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said the deal was a "major step forward". He said: "This clears the way for the transfer of power from London to the Assembly."
Mr Adams and Mr Trimble held two private meetings late last night to help seal the deal which has ended months of stalemate over key elements of the Good Friday Agreement.
Under the deal the 10 northern local government departments are:
Agriculture and rural development; enterprise, trade and investment (to include tourism); health, social care and public safety; finance and personnel; education; advanced education, training and employment; the environment; regional development; social development; and culture, arts and leisure.
The all-Ireland implementation bodies will be: Inland waterways, food safety, trade and business development, European programmes, Language (Irish and Ulster Scots) and Aquaculture.
A further six areas of cooperation have also been identified in line with the Good Friday agreement.
Irish Prime Minister, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern welcomed the agreement, calling it "a highly significant and encouraging step forward in the implementation of the Good Friday agreement."
He added: "It shows once again that with sufficient perseverance and commitment, and with a willingness to seek accommodation and to resolve difference, progress can be made and obstacles overcome. Mr Ahern praised the efforts of Mr Trimble, Seamus Mallon, Deputy First Minister, and the other parties, in particular Sinn Fein. He also appreciated the "continuing and vital" role played by President Bill Clinton.
"There remains substantial scope for the further development by agreement of co-operation, including the establishment of additional implementation bodies," he said.
"There are still major issues to be addressed. But I believe ... that real satisfaction can be drawn from the good progress we have made together through dialogue."