NI talks seek end to deadlock (Harford Courant-LATimes) -- Irish Media Watch Message Board

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Date Posted: 01:22:42 09/20/04 Mon GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: NI talks seek end to deadlock (Harford Courant-LATimes)

http://www.ctnow.com/hc-nire0917.artsep17,0,7815695.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Northern Ireland Talks Seek End To Deadlock
By JOHN DANISZEWSKI
Los Angeles Times

September 17 2004

LONDON -- In a bid to restore power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland two years after it broke down, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland opened a round of talks Thursday in southern England.
The discussions at Leeds Castle in Kent aim to end the deadlock that has frozen the peace process in Northern Ireland since the breakdown of the British territory's joint assembly in October 2002.
The talks bring together political leaders including Gerry Adams of the Catholic, Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party and Protestant preacher Ian Paisley of the pro-British Democratic Unionists.
Blair and Ahern have spent months orchestrating the talks, considered the most important since the discussions that led to the last Northern Ireland breakthrough, the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998.
Unionist negotiators are demanding an ironclad commitment from Sinn Fein that the Irish Republican Army will disarm, decommission its weapons and renounce violence, moving its struggle to unite Northern Ireland with Ireland strictly to the political sphere. Sinn Fein is considered the political wing of the IRA.
"They know what has to be done. The question is, do they have the will to do it?" said David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist party, considered more moderate than Paisley's group.
Trimble, who is also participating in the talks, said that continuing paramilitary activity, "particularly by the IRA," had doomed the Northern Ireland assembly two years ago, and only an end to all such activity would allow power-sharing to resume.
It would be the first time that Sinn Fein and Paisley's Democratic Unionists - parties representing the more extreme views of their respective constituencies - have sat down together for peace negotiations. Before the talks, Adams was hinting broadly that Sinn Fein would go the extra mile to accommodate its critics.
"A deal between Sinn Fein and the [Democratic Unionists] is inevitable," Adams said. "Will it happen this weekend? We are here to make it happen this weekend."
The regional assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended in 2002 amid charges that the IRA had mounted an intelligence operation inside the government. Since then, the province has reverted to direct British rule.
Experts said the key this time will be whether any IRA pledge to turn over its weapons will have sufficient credibility to persuade Paisley's Unionists to sit down in government with Sinn Fein, its lifelong enemies. Trimble's party governed with Sinn Fein before, but Paisley's party is now the largest Protestant party in the Northern Ireland assembly.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

Copyright © 2004, The Los Angeles Times
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