Word: agreement
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...settlement, in one of the world's most tenacious conflicts. After a year of discussions between British and Irish negotiators, the two leaders flew to an Anglo-Irish summit at the 188-year-old Hillsborough Castle, twelve miles to the south of Belfast. There they signed an agreement giving the Irish government an official voice in the running of Northern Ireland for the first time. In return, the FitzGerald government strongly recognized the desire of Ulster's Protestants to remain under Britain's wing...
Specifically, the agreement will lead to the establishment of a British-Irish body to be called the Intergovernmental Conference. It is also intended to lead to "devolution," the transfer of powers from the British government in London to the elected Northern Ireland Assembly, which today is dominated by Protestants and boycotted by Catholics. The newly created conference will reinforce British-Irish efforts to combat terrorism and will attempt to improve relations between the predominantly Protestant security forces and the Catholic community. It will delve into legal matters, perhaps proposing that courts handling security cases be made up of judges from...
Though British officials had gone to considerable lengths to downplay the significance of the event, the summit agreement reverberated across Britain and Ireland like a distant explosion. The straightforward language of the accord raised as many fears as it did hopes. Said Professor John A. Murphy, a history teacher at University College, Cork: "There is no grand solution. You can only make incremental moves. This seems to be a courageous one. It's the first time a role for the south has been formally recognized [in Northern Ireland] since 1925. This has to be a dramatic development...
FitzGerald and Thatcher faced a formidable array of opposition, ranging from the Irish Republican Army and its political wing, Sinn Fein, to many Protestant political leaders and militants in paramilitary organizations like the Ulster Defense Association. Neither government had any illusion that the agreement would have much impact right away. Explained an Irish official: "The real purpose of this exercise is to detach the northern [Catholic] community from the clutches of the I.R.A. We know that won't happen in six weeks. If it happens in a year, it will be a bloody miracle...
...most immediate backlash was expected to come from Ulster's 1 million Protestants, whose political leaders bitterly oppose Anglo-Irish talks. They insist that any role by the Irish Republic in the affairs of the province is an infringement of British sovereignty. As such, they fear that the agreement marks the beginning of a process that will lead inevitably to a united Ireland under Dublin's control. Said Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party: "We're being cast aside, and there's a deep sense of betrayal...