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Adams’s ‘consent’ admission raises few eyebrows

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams’s acknowledgement that there must be Protestant “assent and consent” to a United Ireland received a muted reaction from Unionists in Northern Ireland. Most preferred to leave that to their party leader, David Trimble, in New York.

Adams made the remarks during the Forum on the Northern Ireland peace process that took place on Sunday morning as part of the World Economic Forum in New York.

The SDLP, however, was quick to react, with the party’s minister for finance, Sean Farren, saying that Sinn Fein were “once again following the SDLP’s lead.”

Sinn Fein’s Mitchel McLaughlin, said it was the party’s confident view, shared by many in the Unionist community as reflected in divisions within that community, that “we are really well advanced toward the achievement of a united Ireland.”

“The debate about the shape and design of that must begin and Gerry Adams was encouraging that dialogue,” he said. “Both governments have provided for the time when both communities in the North agree on constitutional changes.”

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This, however, is not the spin put on Adams’s speech by the SDLP. “If the republican movement had come to this conclusion sooner, perhaps some of the tragic events, including thousands of deaths, might have been avoided,” Farren said.

“Sinn Fein, when it endorsed the Good Friday agreement also endorsed the principle of consent and followed SDLP thinking on this matter. As Mark Durkan recently pointed out, the best indicator of future Sinn Fein police is current SDLP thinking.”

Colleague Danny O’Connor, from Larne, an SDLP assemblyman, welcomed “Adams’s admission,” saying it was unfortunate that Adams said it before an international conference in New York.

“It would have been much better addressed directly to the Unionist people here in Northern Ireland, as it could go a long way toward allaying the real fears being felt in that community,” he said.

“Now that Gerry Adams has admitted that the political assent of unionism is necessary for peace on the island of Ireland, it is time for him to tell us that the war is over.”

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