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Date Posted: 01:56:12 09/16/04 Thu GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: U.S. joins new drive for N. Ireland deal (NYTimes)

September 15, 2004

U.S. Joins New Drive for Northern Ireland Deal
By REUTERS

Filed at 7:20 p.m. ET

LEEDS CASTLE, England (Reuters) - U.S. special envoy Mitchell Reiss will join British and Irish leaders at a 1,000-year-old castle on Thursday for talks billed as a final chance to save Northern Ireland's 1998 Good Friday peace accord.

Guerrilla disarmament will be a key issue when British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern try to persuade politicians at the extremes of the British province's Protestant and Roman Catholic communities to strike a deal.

``All the ingredients are there for a deal -- if the will is there (among Northern Ireland's political parties) to do it,'' said a British source, declining to be identified, as Britain and Ireland pressed the two sides to resume power-sharing.

The United States has sent in envoys when Northern Ireland negotiations have hit impasses in the past.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) led by Protestant cleric Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein, political ally of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), have been bitter enemies in the past.

But elections have also made them the political heavyweights on the province's future.

The DUP says the IRA must give up all the weapons which sustained its decades-long campaign against British rule and disband before the party will consider sitting with Sinn Fein in government.

Sinn Fein says republicans will only move if there is a cast-iron guarantee Protestant politicians are willing to share power with it.

The party also wants commitments on British troop withdrawals and policing and judicial reforms.

Breakdowns in trust between the two sides triggered the collapse in October 2002 of a power-sharing government at the heart of the Good Friday accord, prompting Britain to re-impose direct rule from London.

Britain and Ireland, co-guarantors of the Good Friday pact, have invested huge efforts in the peace process since overseeing the signing of the U.S.-brokered accord.

But they have shown mounting frustration with the glacial pace of efforts to disarm guerrilla groups and establish stable self-government.

Blair and Ahern say the two subjects will dominate the agenda when the three-day summit begins at Leeds Castle in southeastern England, a popular tourist attraction complete with moat.

The Good Friday accord largely ended violence that killed more than 3,600 people over three decades, but failed to build trust between Protestant supporters of British ties and Catholic backers of a united Ireland.

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