February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But he sees two more steps that need to be taken for a stable and peaceful environment to take hold in Northern Ireland.
“Sinn Fein needs to join in on policing and if there are any doubts about the PSNI let’s remember that those were members of the PSNI who were taking live rounds defending nationalist communities a couple of weeks ago,” Reiss told the Irish Echo on Tuesday.
The U.S. special envoy was referring to the violence in West Belfast earlier this month when rioting broke out after police did not allow loyalist marchers to enter a nationalist neighborhood.
In the phone interview from his office at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Reiss described the IRA’s disarming as a “fantastic” development.
“That was fantastic, and let’s underline fantastic because I think you can forget how hard it was for Gerry (Adams) and Martin (McGuinness) to manage the process and keep everyone on board and keep themselves alive,” he said.
Such actions, he said, should not be trivialized.
Nevertheless, and no matter how laudatory the decommissioning events might be, Reiss added that policing and building confidence within loyalist communities were both issues still to be surmounted.
“When you have areas that go un-policed because of a lack of cooperation then it’s questionable how long a situation like that can be sustained,” he said.
Reiss is meeting this week with Sinn F