February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The British and Irish governments are, meanwhile, warning that this week’s hothouse discussions may be the last chance at securing a definitive deal to restore power sharing government.
The DUP and Sinn Fein, at least publicly, remain at loggerheads. Republicans insist that they will not tolerate any dilution of the Good Friday agreement.
The DUP is still demanding the immediate disbandment of the IRA before it will lend its support to any renewed executive government. It maintains that even were the IRA to confirm this weekend that it will be standing down it will not join Sinn Fein in government. It is demanding a “cooling off” period between any significant move by republicans and a return to government.
Sinn Fein points out that, if a deal is to be done, the DUP’s current position will have to change. Republicans have noted the increasingly hard-line pronouncements of the DUP leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, in recent weeks and claim that as long as Paisley is in a position to dictate DUP policy a deal is highly unlikely.
Sinn Fein’s president, Gerry Adams, writing in Monday’s Irish Times, said his party would not countenance the DUP’s proposals on changes to the Stormont assembly and the North South bodies.
“The DUP represents the anti-agreement minority of the electorate,” Adams wrote. “The logic of all this is that, if there is to be an agreement involving the DUP and the other parties then the DUP will have to abandon its rejectionist policy.”
Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, said in a radio interview on Tuesday that the parties had an “outside chance” of winning an historic deal.
“My sense of it is that there are people within the DUP of a younger generation who want to do a deal, albeit a deal on their terms,” McGuinness said. “I think they have an absolute need to get Ian Paisley’s fingerprints all over it. It really comes down to how Ian Paisley wants to be regarded in history and some people behind the scenes tell us he wants to do a deal, others say he will never do a deal. The only person who can answer that question is Ian Paisley.”
The DUP, meanwhile, has met with former Canadian Gen. John De Chastelain, the man tasked with overseeing paramilitary decommissioning. De Chastelain flew into Belfast Monday where he met with a DUP delegation headed up by deputy leader Peter Robinson. The DUP outlined its demand for a “visual” aspect to any further acts of IRA decommissioning, although it did not specify what this might entail. De Chastelain is thought to have expressed his view that the IRA would decommission if a deal was struck at the weekend.
“If they want to bring Spielberg and make a movie, I would be very satisfied with that. We have not been prescriptive,” Robinson said. “We want to make clear that the important element is to do something that can convince the community in a way that they have not thus far been convinced that this act has taken place, but also that the scale and nature of it has taken place.
“It is very clear that 10 years after someone calls a ceasefire that there would be an expectation that the weapons of war would have been decommissioned by now. They have not been, but they must be. And there can’t be progress unless they are decommissioned in a way that is conclusive, verifiable, and transparent.”
Reports at the weekend that the IRA is on the verge of a pre-deal act of decommissioning have been played down by republicans and the two governments.
In the event of an abject failure to reach agreement this weekend, the two governments may have to consider some radical alternatives.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the two administrations will have to look at a “Plan B” scenario. While Westminster mandarins have remained tight-lipped about what such a plan may look like, some observers have suggested that some form of joint authority may be a possibility.
The British government is unlikely to refer to agreed governance with Dublin in such terms, but talks insiders claim provision for joint rule already lies in the Good Friday agreement.
The British Irish Intergovernmental Council, sitting in Windsor House, Belfast, could effectively run the North, nationalists have argued. A similar body to the Maryfield secretariat that flowed from the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, its mobilization would likely alarm unionists.
Sinn Fein has claimed that if the prospect of this arrangement were dangled in front of unionist eyes, the DUP would only be too happy to accept power sharing.
The SDLP, DUP and the Ulster Unionists have all weighed in with their own plans for any replacement system. Predictably, both unionist parties have said that direct rule should be the only alternative. Both have said that the North-South bodies cannot operate without the Assembly and should be scrapped if the Assembly is dissolved.
Steven King, an aide to UUP boss David Trimble, said last week that many unionists prefer direct rule to power sharing.
The SDLP’s proposals are much more radical. The party has suggested that an assembly should be put in place that elects an executive of British and Irish politicians. The thought of Irish TDs sitting in Stormont and administering rule in the North is a startling one but also one that is thought very unlikely.