Reports obtained from:
(1) Irish News (Belfast), (2) Irish Republican News, (3) Daily Ireland (Belfast)
Wednesday-Saturday, 23-26 March, 2005
Wednesday, 27 April, 2005
Friday-Tuesday, 29 April-3 May, 2005
Thursday, 5 May, 2005
Wednesday-Saturday, 23-26 March, 2005
Analysis: Electorate to become more polarised
By Brian Feeney, Irish News
Everybody's back from Washington & after dozens of speeches, acres of newsprint & scores of interviews the political scene remains exactly as it was. The only difference is that the elections, both Westminster & local government, are closer, only six weeks from tomorrow.
If recent opinion polls are anything to go by, the elections will confirm the status quo established in November 2003, that is, a completely polarised society where the two communities are drifting even further apart. If anything, the elections will show a hardening of attitudes with the UUP likely to lose East Antrim & Trimble's own seat in Upper Bann under threat. On the nationalist side Sinn Fein will gobble up Newry/Armagh & the SDLP leader faces a do or die struggle in Foyle.
Even so, the Irish & British governments will feel they have to 'do something' to break the deadlock. The real danger is that, faced with two political monoliths after May's elections they will opt for a minimal approach to implementing the Good Friday Agreement. The odds are they will give up trying to resurrect last December's collapsed deal & try to tinker with the assembly. There are already rumours that officials in the British administration here are thinking of giving assembly members powers of scrutiny of some of the proconsul's ministerial minions on the odd day they spend here each week.
Pointless of course, but the British seem desperate to keep the assembly intact although it was not supposed to operate without the balance of the agreement's all-Ireland bodies. Now, strangely all the polls show nationalists want the assembly up & running, but only if there's an executive, whereas unionists are very lukewarm about an assembly designed for them & don't want an executive established when SF dominate the nationalist side.
In order to cobble anything together there will have to be negotiations. How can there be if no-one is talking to SF? If SF aren't included in negotiations leading to an assembly with reduced powers, how can it be anything other than an Orange hall unless the SDLP operate it, which they won't because it would mean oblivion at the next election.
The scenario looks exactly like the Prior assembly of 1982 boycotted by both SF & the SDLP. It was wound up after four years with Paisley being bodily carted out by a large number of puffing policemen. The then proconsul, Jim Prior, called his plan rolling devolution. It just never rolled. Talk about back to the future.
If one lesson was learnt from all the fits & starts here under the Conservatives it is that beginning with the minimum, beguiling though that may be, never leads to anything more. Beginning with the minimum requires a series of steps. The snag is there's never agreement on the next step. It's a departure from the whole concept which led to the Good Friday Agreement & looked like reaching a conclusion last December, namely a one-time, all-embracing deal.
There's only one item holding it all up & that's the IRA standing down. They won't do it in the run-up to an election & the marching season, but people forget the decision has been taken in principle. So far it has proved impossible to implement partly because republicans have made clear standing down will only be 'in the context of the full implementation of the agreement'.
One point is obvious & that is trying to set up a Prior-type assembly with no real powers but simply to keep assembly members in employment is going in the opposite direction from implementing the agreement. It does nothing to solve the policing problem, it eliminates the all-Ireland content of the agreement & it demonstrates the political weakness of the parties here. There's nothing at all in it to attract republicans to make the big jump, indeed the reverse.
The worst short term consequence is that it discredits politics itself. The middle-class on both sides have already virtually stopped voting as the figures from 2003 & last year's euro election show. Attaching a life support system to a moribund assembly will simply convince them they were right in the first place to ignore a talking shop.
The British retain real power.
Copyright © 2005 Irish News
Councils show that Norn Irn (Northern Ireland) doesn't work
By Brian Feeney, Irish News
In case you haven't noticed, and just because there are thousands of posters defiling vertical objects all across the north doesn't mean you would notice, there are council elections next Thursday as well as the Westminster election. It's your chance to select your 582 councillors in the 26 councils.
It's your last chance too, for the recommendations of the review of local administration should have kicked in before the next round of elections.
Next time you might only have seven councils though more likely it will be around a dozen. It won't make any difference though. The only function councils perform is to demonstrate publicly that Norn Irn doesn't work. Councils have been sitting here frozen in aspic since 1972 when their powers were stripped away and handed to quangos like the Education and Library boards (ELBs) and Health boards. Since then unionist councils have continued to behave so badly that powers can't be restored. Doesn't matter whether there are 26 councils or six.
Well it does in fact. If the NIO were to reduce the number of councils to say seven, Belfast, Derry and five other big ones, what you'd find would be that the councils west of the Bann and in south Armagh and Down would be Sinn Féin controlled and would operate power-sharing and rotation of offices while east of the Bann in the one whole and two half counties in Ireland which have unionist majorities, nationalists of any description would be excluded. Lisburn is currently the best example of that discrimination, though given the chance many others would follow suit.
That's why councils remain restricted to emptying the bins, burying the dead, allocating funds for the natives' recreation and giving job creation grants: an economic role as councillors grandly describe that. Aside from that, no councillor in the north has the power to get so much as a street light turned on.
Mind you, if they did gain extra powers some of them wouldn't know what to do with them. Just look and listen to them on the meedja. What an inept, incompetent, semi-literate lot. Only a small sample of them surface with any regularity so you can imagine what the rest of them are like. True, the lack of any power may account for the generally poor quality of councillor but when you see that about 80 percent of assembly members are also councillors you begin to wonder whether the north has produced a political class capable of running a school tuck shop.
They have managed to wash their hands of the financial mess in education. The board officers got all the blame. After failing to notice anything wrong, councillors resigned and trailed out with their committee minutes importantly tucked under their arms upbraiding the NIO minister. Since a substantial block of each ELB is made up of councillors you must conclude that if they can't even scrutinise local education funding how could they manage to scrutinise a local minister and his civil servants?
For thirty odd years the NIO has artificially sustained local councils because they reckon they provided a semblance of 'normality', of 'local democracy'. Well they do. They show that normality here is unionists refusing to share power on equal terms with nationalists at any level unless they're compelled to by self-interest, and even then they sometimes refuse. Councils show that 'local democracy' has to be restricted to the minimum possible in case unionists abuse what little power they're given.
The NIO has resisted making the d'Hondt system compulsory for nominating offices in councils because they know unionists would make councils unworkable as they did in 1986 in protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Instead of sacking the culprits and bringing in commissioners to run their councils, the NIO, as they did in 1986, would cling desperately to the only surviving examples of elected representatives apparently operating in the north.
It's right that they do so, but not for that reason.
If councils with minimal powers can't work, why should anyone think an assembly with local ministers would work? Maintaining hamstrung, deadlocked local councils is a brilliant way to show that nothing, no matter how minuscule, works in the north if unionists are expected to treat nationalist representatives as equals.
Copyright © 2005 Irish News
Friday-Tuesday, 29 April-3 May, 2005
Sinn Fein could be North's largest party
By Irish Republican News
The Westminster election in the North of Ireland on Thursday has become a two-horse race between Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's DUP. Both parties are hoping to gain bargaining power as the North's largest party in the upcoming peace process negotiations.
Sinn Fein's Pat Doherty this week flagged up the potentially historic power-shift: with a strong nationalist turnout, Sinn Fein could become the largest political party in the North in terms of vote share.
Mr Doherty said canvass returns from the across the North demonstrate that his party could secure the highest level of support in the election.
"If the largest party after this election is both nationalist and pro-Agreement this will impact significantly on the future of the political process," he said.
"A decisive vote for Sinn Fein will send a clear signal to the two governments that the process of change outlined in the Good Friday Agreement must be accelerated.
"A strong Sinn Fein mandate will also act as a reality check for unionists who believe that they can turn back the clock, that the days of domination and second class citizenship are over and that the process of change is now irreversible."
However, the DUP has used the prospect of Sinn Fein gains in a bid to drive its supporters to the polls. DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson was sounding the alarm yesterday.
"Unionists must avoid the nightmare scenario of republicans speaking for Ulster after the votes are counted on Friday," he said. "With the Sinn Fein vote on the rise it is vital that unionists turn out to vote on Thursday and vote for the DUP.
"Sinn Fein could not be clearer about the worldwide impact of a victory for them on election day. Unionists must take heed of this when they go out to vote on Thursday."
The DUP appear likely to pick up seats from David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party in East Antrim, South Antrim and in Lagan Valley, the constituency around Lisburn, west of Belfast.
But Ian Paisley's party has found itself hit by a late and unexpected sex scandal involving a reported homosexual hotel-room tryst by its youthful candidate in Newry and Armagh, Paul Berry. The DUP has stonewalled requests for comments and has said only that the matter is in the hands of its solicitors.
The prize of David Trimble's own Upper Bann constituency, centred on Portadown in north Armagh, is a key target. A victory for the DUP's David Simpson would likely mark the end of David Trimble's increasingly fraught political career.
Sinn Fein is likely to take Newry and Armagh from the SDLP, and have outside chances to make a gain from the SDLP in South Down and from the DUP in North Belfast. But the nationalist Foyle constituency, where SDLP leader Mark Durkan is attempting to regain the seat held by former party leader John Hume, is the main target.
Campaigning in Derry this week flanked by MPs Pat Doherty, Martin McGuinness and Michelle Gildernew, it was clear that a huge effort is being made Sinn Fein's Mitchel McLaughlin in a region that was once seen as the SDLP's heartland.
Local economic issues have dominated the election in Derry, and McLaughlin has sought to reverse ehat he said were decades of discrimination and under-funding for the second largest city in the North.
The SDLP is pinning its hopes in South Belfast, where pundits place it in a three-way battle with the two unionist parties.
Nationalists have long sought to reverse the imbalance of representation in Belfast where unionists hold three of the four Westminster seats.
LOCAL BATTLES (Local Council Elections)
Control of Belfast City Council has hung on a knife edge for more than a decade, with the Alliance Party regularly finding itself with the balance of power.
The political make-up of City Hall last time around saw 25 councillors on the unionist benches with the opposition seats being filled by 23 nationalists and three Alliance.
Sinn Fein was the biggest party in 2001 with 14 councillors and 28 per cent of the vote.
The likelihood is that they will pick up at least one extra seat, in south Belfast or the north of the city. But a meltdown of the Ulster Unionist vote could potentially see the DUP becoming the largest party in City Hall.
Deputy Lord Mayor Joe O'Donnell's seat in east Belfast for Sinn Fein is said by some to be under threat following the controversy over the murder of local man Robert McCartney in January.
However, a Sinn Fein rally in the area on Monday was well supported, with a number of high profile speakers including former MP and civil rights leader Bernadette McAliskey, all backing the party's candidate Deborah Devenny.
Republican murals which were rededicated at the rally included one depicting hunger strikers who died in 1981. Also commemorated is the 24th anniversary of the death of hunger striker and former Fermanagh South Tyrone MP, Bobby Sands, which occurs on May 5 -- election day.
At the rally, McAliskey spoke of how the civil rights movement developed into "the death of 10 men" and political and electoral changes in nationalism and republicanism.
"It is a long road but there is a bigger picture out there and a bigger picture for the people of the Short Strand," Ms McAliskey said.
McAliskey is also backing veteran socialist Eamonn McCann for a council seat in Derry, where the SDLP is currently the largest party on the council. However, Sinn Fein believes it can make gains in the Northland and Shantallow wards, and possibly in the Rural ward, where it is also competing against McCann.
PROMISES, PROMISES (Westminster Elections)
But back on the main stage in London, Tony Blair has vowed, if re-elected, to advance the peace process. As he embarked on the final leg of the election campaign, Mr Blair claimed that the North had seen progress in recent years.
"It still comes back to the same basic question, which is that the way forward is for republicans to give up violence completely and totally and go into a different mode of operation altogether of exclusively peaceful and democratic means, and for unionists on that basis to share power."
Both unionist parties have now declared their opposition to sharing power with Sinn Fein in any circumstances.
Reacting to Mr Blair's comments, DUP leader the Rev Ian Paisley said Mr Blair had shown he was determined to bring "Sinn Fein/IRA" into government.
"The cat is out of the bag. He has sold himself to have the representatives of IRA terrorists in the government of Northern Ireland on their terms," Mr Paisley said.
The only way to stop "this folly and treachery" was a vote for his party candidates.
"Only a massive vote by unionists can stop Blair's madness," he declared.
Take Five - Impasse will still be present after election
Tomorrow's electoral struggle between Sinn Féin and the SDLP reminds me of the final rounds in a boxing match where one contestant is seriously damaged. The outcome is clear with the only unanswered question being whether the bout ends by knockout or goes the distance. By the most cautious of estimates, Connor Murphy will take Armagh/Newry off the SDLP and in conjunction with four other party colleagues almost certain to be returned in these Westminster elections, the result will then stand at 5:2 in favour of Sinn Féin.
Should Mark Durkan also lose in Derry, the contest is immediately over. Medics will carry the SDLP to its dressing room and political commentators begin speaking of them in the same tense used for ex-champion Sonny Liston. In either scenario, Gerry Adams's party will emerge as the dominant force within nationalist politics. The question then becomes, 'and what now?'
When the posters are removed and the euphoria subsides, Paisley, Robinson and Donaldson will still be there, just as opposed to dealing with republicans as ever. Historically aware unionists know that Terence O'Neill, Brian Faulkner and now David Trimble all fell when they advocated détente with nationalists. The Sinn Féin president is surely mistaken if he believes that it's only a matter of time before the DUP will be persuaded to join that legion of the lost.
There are signs nevertheless, that Sinn Féin's leadership is not staking too much on Paisleyite goodwill and is therefore aware of the need to promote fundamental changes within the wider movement. Gerry Adams has been unusually explicit when urging the IRA to cease activity and verifiably decommission its weapons. If such a development were to happen, the political landscape would be altered permitting republicans to claim the moral high ground during media interviews or in discussions with London and Dublin.
Sinn Féin may thus accrue some advantage from the situation but it's still difficult to imagine any republican party pleasing unionism's obdurate wing. While the situation for people living in Northern Ireland has improved since the Troubles ended, there is no consensus about the region's governance. Tomorrow's election will not change that or the fact the area is a failed political entity.
With Sinn Féin assuming greater influence, it is time for them to tell us if they have any better strategy for breaking this impasse than waiting for Paisley's demise and Peter Robinson to do political somersaults. Tommy McKearney is a former member of the IRA and now works with ex-prisoners and as an organizer for the Independent Workers Union.
Copyright © 2005 Daily Ireland