February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Anne Cadwallader
BELFAST — The second anniversary of the Good Friday agreement came and went this week as gloom deepened over its long-term survival. Leading Unionists demanded that it be junked, while Sinn Fein, the Social Democratic and Labor Party and the Irish government said the institutions suspended on Feb. 11 should be reinstated.
The British and Irish governments have been involved in a desperate bid to find a way to achieve that before Easter. The May 22 target date for paramilitary arms decommissioning looms and it is feared that the impending summer marching season will slam shut this last window of opportunity to restore local government in the near future.
There are increasing signs from the Ulster Unionists that they have given up on the agreement. The Ulster Unionist Party’s deputy leader, John Taylor, said it had been a “good” agreement for unionists, but that republicans had wrecked it by refusing to honor their commitments to decommissioning.
Sinn Fein, using the slogan “Ireland votes, Britain vetoes,” demanded that the agreement be reimplemented immediately and its democratic institutions restored.
After an hour-long meeting with UUP leader David Trimble, the SDLP leader, John Hume, said the sense of gloom at the non-implementation of the agreement must be set aside. He described the talks as detailed and constructive and a number of ideas had been explored on how to advance the political process. He said he hoped there would be a meeting soon with the British and Irish governments to find a way forward.
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Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Mandelson, raised a few hopes among nationalists this week when he said that politicians must “think hard about the implications of making decommissioning a condition for the revival of institutions.”
“What purpose has been served if, in trying to achieve both devolution and decommissioning, we end up with neither,” he said. “Decommissioning is most likely to happen in the context of the implementation of the whole of the agreement, including the restoration of institutions.”
He added, however, that the restoration of institutions would be most likely to happen if there was genuine confidence on all sides that decommissioning would happen in good time, and that the threat has been removed for good.
Speaking on the second anniversary of the agreement, he claimed that there was a lot “going on behind the scenes.”
“I hope in the next two weeks we will see two things: we will see agreement on how we can get the [devolved)] institutions back up and running again but also agreement on how decommissioning is going to be achieved,” he said.
Meanwhile, at the British House of Commons there was a renewed unionist effort to demand changes in the police reform plan recommended by the Patton Commission. Despite the support of the British Conservative Party, however, a UUP resolution to postpone changes to the RUC failed.
During the debate, however, Mandelson appeared to concede that the old RUC cap badge might be retained after all, although he made no such concessions on the name of the RUC. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is due in Northern Ireland this week to confer the George Medal on the force.
Mandelson further alarmed nationalists when he said: “I have not decided what this should be, but I am not convinced that it need be entirely neutral, free of association with either tradition, as recommended.”