1.4.2007
Reports obtained from:
(1) Ulster Television, (2) Irish News, (3) Irish Republican News
Tuesday, 27 March, 2007
Wednesday, 28 March, 2007
Thursday, 29 March, 2007
Saturday-Thursday, 24-29 March, 2007
Victim's father praises NI deal
By Ulster Television - UTV
The father of a young victim of the IRA's bombing campaign in Britain gave a warm welcome to the historic deal between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams.
Colin Parry, whose 12-year-old son, Tim, was killed in the bomb attack on Warrington in 1993, said he hoped it would mean an end to the bloodshed.
"I think this is the way forward. Forgiveness is an entirely separate issue," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. "The key issue is that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, two diametrically-opposed politicians, are at long, long last being required to do some serious business and I think everyone has to be pleased about that.
"This situation has to be applauded.
"The stark truth is that, with any good luck, there`ll be no more children and people killed as a result of this ancient conflict and the beginnings of normal politics will start on May 8."
Copyright © Ulster Television 2007
This is wonderful says victims' group
By Bimpe Fatogun, Irish News
Two days after the start of the 1974 Ulster Workers Council strike came the biggest loss of life on a single day in the Troubles.
Ian Paisley had taken a high-profile role in the strike which began on May 15 and led to the fall of a short-lived power-sharing administration.
The collapse of the executive established under the Sunningdale Agreement on January 1 has been cited as at least a contributory factor to the massive death toll which followed in the next 30 years of sectarian strife.
Thirty-three people died and many more were injured and maimed by coordinated UVF car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan on May 17 1974.
In Dublin 25 people were killed or fatally injured by three car bombs which went off almost simultaneously and without warning around the city centre during rush-hour. A bus strike meant there were more pedestrians than usual on the streets.
Ninety minutes later another exploded in Monaghan, killing six people and fatally injuring another.
Margaret Urwin is spokeswoman for Justice for the Forgotten, the support and pressure group representing the victims of the bombings.
She welcomed yesterday's rapprochement between Mr Paisley and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
"It is a wonderful day," Ms Urwin said.
"It is marvellous that this [power-sharing] is going to happen and is on course, even if one more deadline has been missed.
"It is good that it is going ahead in May and that is the time we will see the beginning of the end of the conflict.
"It is a good month as it is the anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings."
Ms Urwin said victims and relatives were taking the breakthrough at face value rather than reflecting on what might have been.
"Of course one would love to say that it should have happened before this but we can't turn back the clock unfortunately," she said.
In fact, Ms Urwin said that following the publication of the recent report by Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan and others by Mr Justice Henry Barron – all into security-force collusion with paramilitaries – she believed Sunningdale was always going to be a false dawn.
"It was more than an opportunity missed," she said.
"I think there were forces in the background keeping the pot boiling on both sides. These forces were part of the British establishment.
"One of the terrible tragedies was that it was not just about loyalists and republicans or Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley. It was about who was pulling the strings."
Copyright © Irish News 2007
Paisley's rocky road to unlikely agreement
By William Scholes, Irish News
Ian Paisley has made a remarkable journey from never land to standing on the brink of entering the promised land of power-sharing with Sinn Féin. William Scholes reports
After years of threatening to eat republicans for breakfast, Ian Paisley yesterday (Monday) shared a dining table with Gerry Adams.
For decades the DUP leader had said he would never hold face-to-face meetings with the Sinn Féin president yet here he was, if not exactly rubbing shoulders with his implacable foe, but sat next to him, sharing opposite sides of the same corner of a diamond-shaped Stormont table.
The body language was understandably awkward. Each held his own hands tightly clasped in front of him, as if trying to stop a captured moth from escaping – all the better to avoid a handshake. And while Mr Adams fixed one of his million-watt lighthouse beam grins on his imminent partner in government, the DUP leader – all pursed lips and no eye contact – looked like he had sucked a lemon.
For Mr Paisley, who played a key role in bringing down previous devolved administrations, it represented a remarkable volte face.
There might have been a quickening sense of inevitability in recent weeks about a meeting between the leader of anti-agreement unionism and arch-republicanism but in the canon of false dawns, shattered dreams and lurches towards stability that has shaped Northern Ireland over the past 40 years, the image of 'Dr No' sitting beside Mr Adams counts as a genuinely historic development.
It is one of the final skittles to fall in the bowling alley of northern politics: Among others, unionists and nationalists have agreed to power sharing; policing reforms have been embraced by Sinn Féin; the IRA has decommissioned and ended its campaign; British army demilitarisation is well under way.
But many of the most obstinate obstacles to political progress have involved Mr Paisley.
The son of a Baptist pastor from Sixmile-cross near Omagh, in Co Tyrone, Mr Paisley was born in Lurgan, Co Armagh on April 6 1926. His father was minister in Armagh at the time but the family soon moved to Ballymena.
He was ordained by his father in 1946 and in 1951 founded the Free Presbyterian Church.
Mr Paisley has repeatedly said he is a preacher first and a politician second.
"Let me tell you friends, that I am first and foremost a Protestant preacher of the old time religion and I am only in politics incidentally because of the tragedy of our country," he told a congregation in Sixmilecross in 1972.
By then he had already cemented his reputation as a fundamentalist Protestant and unionist and a divisive figure in Irish public life.
Visits to Stormont in 1965 by Taoiseach Sean Lemass and two years later by his successor Jack Lynch – famously punctuated by Mr Paisley and his supporters throwing snowballs at Mr Lynch's car – inspired an 'O'Neill must go' campaign [an attempt to drive then Stormont prime minister Terence O'Neill from office].
After leading anti-Civil Rights Movement protests at the tail end of the 1960s, he emerged as a political force in 1970. In April he won a seat for his Protestant Unionist Party in the Stormont Parliament followed in June by the North Antrim seat at Westminster. The DUP was formed in 1971, with Mr Paisley becoming its leader in 1973.
A year later he and his supporters played a lead role in the Ulster Workers' Council strike which led to the collapse of the Sunningdale power-sharing experiment.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 met similar Paisley opposition – including the iconic "Never, never, never, never" speech at Belfast City Hall – and joined the ranks of political deals which Mr Paisley branded as British government sell-outs. The Downing Street Declaration of 1993 and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement were further 'sell-outs'.
Since the last collapse of devolution in 2002 and the DUP's emergence and consolidation as the largest unionist party, Mr Paisley has played a canny game to manoeuvre himself into the post of First Minister and follow in the steps of Edward Carson and James Craig, unionist icons whose memories he has frequently evoked.
Despite combating illness in 2004 – he wrote that he had "walked along death's shadow" – Mr Paisley led his party into talks aimed at restoring devolution held at Leeds Castle in England.
There was some encouragement in 2004 when Mr Paisley made his first political visit to Dublin to meet Taoiseach Bertie Ahern but by December things looked bleaker as he failed to accept that the IRA had decommissioned, demanding that the Provos wear sackcloth and ashes "until they wear out".
There were elections to be fought in 2005 and amid some traditionally fiery rhetoric – "I have a message for Gerry Adams; this unionist is not for budging" and "What he [David Trimble] is counting is the time to the electric chair and the rope" – Mr Paisley stated he would share power with Sinn Féin if there was "no arms and no crime".
By October 2006 and the St Andrews agreement, the once unimaginable – power-sharing between Sinn Féin and the DUP – seemed a realistic, if faint, prospect.
When Sinn Féin voted to back the PSNI and the courts, one of the last great hurdles was overcome, leaving Mr Paisley to deal only with the murmurings of dissent within his own ranks – never likely to be a serious threat to the demagogue.
Many of Mr Paisley's most loyal supporters, both religious and political, regard him with almost messianic fervour – something he would be quick to distance himself from.
But as he grimaced for that photograph, it is ironic to note that Mr Paisley could not have sat beside Mr Adams yesterday without the work done by David Trimble's John the Baptist.
Copyright © Irish News 2007
North needs a new political vocabulary
By Brian Feeney, Irish News
In 1989 the American academic and political philosopher Francis Fukuyama wrote his most famous article, 'The End of History'.
He asserted that, with the sudden unexpected collapse of communism, competing ideologies had vanished and that liberal democracy was going to emerge as the only viable political system in the world.
You got a sense that on a much tinier Irish scale a similar sea change occurred on Monday when you watched Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley sitting nearly beside each other at Stormont.
After 40 years - some would say 80 - of ya-boo abuse between unionists and republicans, massive and intense violence, draconian security powers, military repression and all the rest of it, here they were agreeing to work together as equals, sharing the administration of the north and, according to Ian Paisley's statement, fully participating in all the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement which includes all-Ireland bodies.
So, just as unthinkable as it once was that republicans would fully participate in administering and policing the north from Stormont, it was once equally unthinkable that unionists - and Ian Paisley's unionists at that - would fully participate in devising and sharing policies for the whole island of Ireland.
What is immediately clear is that, whatever about institutions, a new political vocabulary for the north is needed.
The UUP and SDLP did themselves no service with their begrudgery about the new deal.
The Alliance Party in their bewildered reaction confirmed their utter irrelevance in the new arrangements - for if there is one consequence of Monday's compact it is that Alliance politics have nothing to do with the north of Ireland.
Their party spokespersons waffle on about 'normal politics', apparently completely unaware that the north is more like Belgium or the Netherlands or even Switzerland, in all of which countries specific governmental systems had to be devised to cope with the difficulties of a divided community and in some cases multiple divided communities.
In such places normal politics means those communities sharing governance together in acceptance of each other's differences. In such places 'bread and butter' politics proceeds just as you would expect, belying the absurd assumption that a British system of politics is a necessary requirement.
In this place it was the refusal to accept difference as legitimate but instead to push it to division that caused the trouble.
It was the pretence, in defiance of all the evidence of elections, housing, education preference and culture, that there is only one community and only one world view that excluded any manifestation of Irishness that bedevilled politics and society here for generations.
One of the first tasks of any incoming executive will be to purge the civil service here of its Alliance mentality, the pernicious view that 'neutrality' is and should be the preferred aim in every endeavour, and substitute it with the thinking which lies behind the Good Friday Agreement, namely a full recognition of equal rights for unionists and nationalists.
It was that Alliance mentality in the NIO which ensured that the north's quangos were stuffed with 'nayce' Catholics and Protestants, whose only qualification had to be that they were neither overtly nationalist nor unionist and therefore did not represent the mentality of the majority of people living here. The aim being that somehow the north could come to resemble Finchley.
What an ideal to aspire to.
What's to happen now that unionists and republicans don't have each other to abuse but instead recognise each other's rights? What's to happen now that the SDLP and UUP don't have Sinn Fein and the DUP to criticise and blame for delay and obstruction?
Well, everyone, including some of the new partners in SF and DUP, is going to have to learn the new language of politics in the north. For a start, it's just plain stupid to keep talking about how the party leaders have stood on their heads and sold out on their basic principles.
That's what the voters have just encouraged them to do. It's not as if Monday's deal was unpopular. It's exactly what the majority in both communities wanted.
So there's no point in criticising Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley for doing what the people voted for.
Get over it.
Copyright © Irish News 2007
At long last, an omen of good days to come
By Jim Gibney, Irish News
I thought the photo of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley sitting at a joint press conference said it all about the historical significance of the occasion until I read the scripts that both men read out.
It is difficult to decide which captures best the ground-breaking nature of the event - the photo or the statements.
Taken separately they have their own distinct appeal and import. Many times photographers have tried to snap an unsuspecting Ian Paisley in proximity to Gerry Adams or indeed Martin McGuinness when they were in the vicinity of one another.
Such images have a novel appeal. But a planned, agreed and authorised photo of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley brings with it a special moment in time, frozen forever, unalterable - no matter what unfolds from here.
The photo shows Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, side by side, at 12.15pm on Monday March 26 2007 with their political leaderships.
The background tale of how both men were ushered to their seats will undoubtedly emerge. At most the record will likely show a period of some 36 to 48 hours of intensive negotiations involving the British government, Sinn Fein and DUP representatives - remarkable developments.
But of course the real story goes way beyond the hours immediately preceding the press conference.
Ian Paisley is a product of more than 400 years of British colonial, Protestant and unionist history on this island.
Gerry Adams is a product of 800 years of Britain's occupation of this island.
They sat at the press conference table with that history bearing down on them.
Their statements show, although mindful of it, they were not burdened by its weight.
On the contrary their carefully crafted words tapped into the popular sentiment that both men knew the occasion would generate among the public.
Ian Paisley's statement, in the circumstances, may well be the most positive of his entire
political life.
He spoke about a "constructive engagement" with Sinn Fein producing a "binding resolution" to restore the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement on May 8.
He committed himself to 'regular meetings' now with Martin McGuinness in their roles as first and deputy first ministers designate; to a joint meeting with Sinn Fein lobbying the British Chancellor for a substantial peace dividend; to a series of meetings with all the parties to prepare the new ministers for the executive.
He said the DUP would deliver not only for the "people who voted for the DUP but for all the people..."
Of the 'horrors and tragedies of the past' he said they should not "become a barrier to creating a better and more stable future".
Gerry Adams, more practiced in using the language of invitation and reconciliation, not surprisingly produced a statement which encapsulated Ireland and its people's tragic history of conflict.
He spoke about the relationships between "the people of this island being marred by centuries of discord, conflict, hurt and tragedy", of the "sad history of orange and green", about the need to build a "new relationship between orange and green and all the other colours, where every citizen can share and have equality of ownership of a peaceful, prosperous and just future".
He talked about the "beginning of a new era of politics on this island", of the potential of parties working together to "build a new, harmonious and equitable relationship between nationalists and republicans and unionists". It was he said a "time for generosity".
Both men reserved a cherished place for those who suffered during the conflict and referred to the debt owed to them by politicians to fashion the "best future possible" - a phrase they borrowed from each other's speech.
The relaxed mood of the press conference was reflected in the public commentary that ran alongside it.
People had voted for the breakthrough and they wanted to describe their feelings on a day which seemed to emerge from nowhere with incredible speed.
It was a 'great day' a 'turning point on the road' a 'quantum leap forward' 'a unique link in the chain of history', a 'dream come true'.
For one journalist it was 'a de Klerk-Mandela moment'.
For Ireland it was an Adams-Paisley moment. An omen of good days to come at long last.
Copyright © Irish News 2007
Saturday-Thursday, 24-29 March, 2007
Sign of change
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has said a breakthrough deal on power-sharing following the first-ever direct talks with DUP leader Ian Paisley means that "a new and unprecedented opportunity for progress now exists".
Extraordinary television images of the two party leaders sitting together following the announcement of the deal on Monday have been widely hailed as heralding the dawn of a new era in the Six Counties.
Mr Adams, wearing an Easter lily in his lapel to commemorate those who died in the 1916 Easter Rising, sat just across the table from Mr Paisley.
The two parties have agreed to share power on May 8, six weeks later than originally planned by the Dublin and London governments -- but it is the first time the two parties have jointly signed up to any plan to run the Six Counties. On May 8th -- just weeks ahead of the expected election date in the 26 Counties, powers will be transferred to a Six-County executive headed by Ian Paisley as First Minister and Sinn Fein chief negotiator Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister.
The deal should see the full implementation of the St Andrew's Agreement, a document issued by the two governments in October and based on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The parties also agreed to make further attempts to increase the 'peace dividend' which will be transferred from the British Exchequer to fund the new institutions, and to begin a work programme of high-level discussions on future policy.
Although negotiations continued up to Sunday night, most of the focus on Monday shifted to the new public spirit of agreement and co-operation between the former enemies. The so-called 'optics' of the deal had an immense impact on the national and international media, while the statements subsequently released -- particularly that by Mr Paisley -- were genuinely historic in their tone of reconciliation.
However, there have been signs of mounting dissent within the DUP this week, while Mr Adams has warned there was still "much work to be done".
Expressing confidence that the process would now succeed, the Sinn Fein leader thanked supporters across the world for helping the party reach this point.
"People are more hopeful now than at any time since the Good Friday Agreement," said Mr Adams.
"Of course, there is still a long way to go and much work to be done but I believe it is right and proper that we take this time to thank all of those who helped create this opportunity. Particularly those in the international community who backed the search for peace and supported the centrality of inclusive dialogue and negotiations, when such concepts were not popular.
"I want to especially thank the Irish diaspora around the world. Those Irish or of Irish descent who make up Irish America, or live in Canada and Australia and elsewhere who have played a pivotal role in the development of the peace process.
"There are many such far sighted people from all walks of life. >From the corporate world, NGOs, the Labour movement, the Arts and literary world as well as political representatives. Too many to name. But I think of leaders like Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London who was vilified in the British and Irish media for daring to speak away back in the early 1980s to Sinn Fein and Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn and many others in London.
"And then there are a whole host of others like President Clinton; Senator George Mitchell; former South African President Nelson Mandela, the current South African President Thabo Mbeki; President Fidel Castro; Cyril Ramaphosa; Martti Ahtisaari; Senators Kennedy and Dodds, and Congress members like Jim Walsh and Richie Neal and Peter King. And many, many more.
"I also want to thank President Bush who has remained focused and committed to the peace process throughout his time in office and who has appointed a succession of special envoys who have played a key role in the peace process.
"I want to see a very public and heartfelt go raibh maith agaibh - thank you - to all of them. We are where we are because of their trust and confidence in us. They never gave up - even when things looked bad.
"Our responsibility to the people of Ireland and to all of our international friends and comrades is to commit ourselves to never give up, and to keep pushing this process forward to the day when we achieve Irish freedom and a free united Ireland."
Copyright © Irish Republican News 2007
Saturday-Thursday, 24-29 March, 2007
Mixed reaction to power-sharing delay
"Everything we have done over the last 10 years has been a preparation for this moment," proclaimed British Prime Minister Tony Blair, leading a vocal and mainly positive response by Irish and British political leaders to the successful outcome of the DUP-Sinn Fein negotiations this week.
Mr Blair said it was "a very important day for the people of Northern Ireland but also for the people and the history of these islands", while 26-County Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said the agreement was "unprecedented" and had "the potential to transform the future of this island".
SDLP leader Mark Durkan, while welcoming yesterday's developments, said he could not understand why power-sharing could not have happened on Monday.
Mr Durkan described yesterday's events as "Sunningdale digitally enhanced" in a reference to the power-sharing attempt in the mid-1970s.
"A lot of people today will wonder about all the lost years, the lost opportunities, and the lost lives," he said.
Ulster Unionist leader Reg Empey said that nine years ago Mr Paisley had denounced what was now on the table.
"Today he is with what he calls Sinn Fein/IRA and he seemingly does not have any problem with that," he said.
"What has his whole career been about when unionists could have had a far better deal than what is on the table today?"
Alliance leader David Ford said yesterday's move was a historic step forward for the Six Counties but he expressed disappointment at the six-week delay in restoring power-sharing.
Republican Sinn Fein leader Ruairi O Bradaigh said the accord consolidated English rule in Ireland.
"It is based on the Partition not alone of Ireland but also of the province of Ulster and is an artificial method of administering an artificial entity of Six Irish Counties.
"As such it cannot work in the long term.
"Once more English money has been decisive in cobbling it together. While it may postpone Irish national independence it cannot prevent that ideal being ultimately achieved by the Irish people."
O Bradaigh again called for a nine-county Ulster parliament within a federation of the four traditional provinces of Ireland.
US CONGRATULATIONS
The US government and leading US politicians welcomed the agreement and promised the US would help to ensure a new executive could succeed.
Paula Dobriansky, president George Bush's special envoy on the North, congratulated the people of the Six Counties for demonstrating that a new era had started.
"We also congratulate, in particular, UK prime minister Tony Blair and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, whose leadership throughout the process was critical to bringing a successful conclusion.
"As special envoy, I will do all I can to assist the people of Northern Ireland in moving into full and effective government that fully implements the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements," she said.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton described yesterday's agreement as "the culmination of a long and historic journey" that would transform the lives of the people of Ireland.
Republican senator John McCain said that, although the term "historic" was almost a cliche, the agreement between the DUP and Sinn Fein was just that.
Congressman Richard Neal, chairman of the Friends of Ireland in the US House of Representatives, said that the agreement was one of the most significant developments on the island of Ireland in more than a century.
"I would like to congratulate both Rev Paisley and Gerry Adams on this remarkable achievement. The historic compromise they reached today took courage and vision. They took a genuine risk for peace. And thanks to their efforts, a new era in Northern Ireland is about to begin," he said.
Mr Neal, who will lead a bipartisan congressional delegation to Ireland on Friday, said he would tell Northern politicians that the US is ready to help.
"We can see what economic growth has done for the Republic of Ireland and there's no reason why that couldn't take place in the North," he said.
Copyright © Irish Republican News 2007