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Unionists Defiant

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader and Jack Holland

BELFAST — An angry Seamus Mallon, the SDLP deputy leader, said on Tuesday that the British government was seriously damaging the peace process by drip feeding more concessions to the UUP.

“My message is, if you continue with this drip feed, then you will strangle the political process and I want to put that message as strongly as I can,” he said. He described it as “government by concession.”

Mallon spoke after a five-member SDLP delegation had met with Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Mandelson to express their concerns the proposed police-reform bill was a dilution of the Patten recommendations on which the bill was supposed to be based.

Sources described the meeting as “fraught.” Mandelson was said to have waved aside the points they raised about the proposed bill as mere details.

A furious Sinn Fein said that the two governments had promised that the Patten proposals on policing would not be up for negotiations.

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“If the British government moves away from this, it will be in clear breach of its commitments on Patten as set down in their letter to the parties 10 days ago,” Martin McGuinness said.

Indeed, nationalists and republicans, meanwhile, could only look on in astonishment at increasingly desperate British government attempts to persuade the UUP to accept the latest IRA offer on decommissioning.

Among other things, Mandelson has agreed to:

€ delay publishing legislation to reinstate the Assembly, Executive and All Ireland Ministerial Council until after the UUP’s ruling Council meeting on Saturday;

€ delay a final decision on the name of the new police force, and made himself the arbiter of what it will be;

€ give himself powers to rule whether the union flag will fly over all government buildings, including those where Sinn Fein ministers work;

€ state that Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom and that this will be visibly recognized in the symbols of state even after devolution;

€ promise that if the Assembly and Executive collapse again, so will the All Ireland Ministerial Council

€ hold out hope to the UUP of further significant concessions on policing.

Even with this list of concessions, the UUP seem increasingly reluctant to agree to participate in a new Executive. Spokesman Danny Kennedy said after his party’s assembly group meeting that the British government had not gone far enough.

In a letter to reassure David Trimble, the UUP leader, Mandelson said the UUP had made “a strong case” on policing and that he believed “we can find ways of retaining an honorable and permanent place for the RUC name, consistent with implementing the reform proposals of the Patten report.”

Chances deteriorate

Despite a surge of optimism in the immediate aftermath of the IRA’s offer on May 6 to open some of its arms dumps to inspectors, opinions have since hardened in the Unionist camp.

Trimble now says the vexed issue of decommissioning cannot be resolved by the inspection of arms dumps alone. He is seeking a timetable for the final and complete disarming of the IRA.

Speaking after the two international examiners (former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari and former secretary general of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa) arrived in Belfast for the first time, Trimble said he was seeking “further clarification” of the IRA’s statement about putting its weapons beyond use.

The special meeting of the UUP’s ruling Council has been called for Saturday, May 20, but Trimble has made it clear he is not committed to making any recommendation to its members, either in favor or opposing the resumption of a power-sharing Executive.

“If I am to table a motion to return to government — and I haven’t said I will,” Trimble said on Sunday, “it will depend on having my expectations fulfilled in the course of the week.”

May 20 is just two days before the British government’s target date for reinstating the Assembly and Executive so a nail-biting few hours are expected on Saturday morning as the UUP makes up its mind.

The Council is meeting under its old rules, which mean at least 120 members of the body are there as members of the Orange Order. Many more delegates from the constituencies and elsewhere will also be members of one of the loyal orders.

Unionists are also demanding that the name of the RUC be retained in the official title of the new police force, and that the incoming ministers should have no right to say which flag flies over their departmental headquarters.

Of critical importance to the final outcome of Saturday’s vote will be the views of the UUP deputy leader, John Taylor, who initially said he thought there was a 90 percent chance of the Ulster Unionist Council supporting a new Executive.

Only a few days later, however, Taylor has said the chances had fallen significantly and now stood at 60 percent. In a letter published in London Times newspaper, Taylor said he needed a guarantee that the Union flag would continue to fly over government buildings in Belfast and elsewhere.

Sinn Fein ministers Bairbre de Brun and Martin McGuinness, when in power, had ordered that if the tri-color and the union flag were flown over their offices, neither should have pre-eminence.

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