Word: belfasters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BELFAST, Northern Ireland: The war is over. In what TIME London Bureau Chief Barry Hillenbrand calls "an astonishing departure" from the politics of bloodshed that has dominated Northern Ireland for three decades, people here -- with a record turnout of 81.1 percent -- have voted 71 percent in favor of the landmark peace agreement hammered out last month by eight parties and the British and Irish governments...
...BELFAST: The ayes have it, British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted Thursday in his bid to coax voters to deliver a resounding 'yes' on the Irish peace accord in Friday's referendum. TIME London bureau chief Barry Hillenbrand reports that anxiety over a "no" vote had increased after the initial euphoria over the deal gave way to mounting fear in the Protestant community -- spooked by the dire warnings of rejectionists -- that the early release of convicted IRA terrorists would set killers loose among them. Blair was at pains to reassure voters today to stress that parties committed to violence would...
...number of the key men--and some of the women--who negotiated the settlement inside a mundane office building in Belfast shared McConville's journey through violence, prison and now political accommodation. In the 1970s Gusty Spence, a senior member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group, was so famous that after he was sentenced to prison for murder, tea towels with his picture on them were sold on the streets of Belfast. "We exorcised our ghosts in prison," says Spence, who is on the negotiating team of the Progressive Unionist Party. "We were self-questioning...
...Washington last Friday, Bill Clinton began a 30-minute phone conversation with George Mitchell in Belfast. The parties were eight hours past the negotiating deadline, but a breakthrough was close. Mitchell asked the President to make another round of calls to save the pact the former Maine Senator had drafted. No sooner did Mitchell hang up than British Prime Minister Tony Blair phoned the White House, asking Clinton to call and reassure wavering unionist leader David Trimble. Everyone was up most of the night, but nine hours later an exhausted and exhilarated Mitchell announced the deal that few had given...
...seriously also made it harder for him to backtrack from diplomacy. After an I.R.A. cease-fire in 1994, Clinton and senior aides stepped up the frequency of meetings with Protestant Unionist leaders who had long considered Washington biased toward a united Ireland. When the President visited London, Dublin and Belfast in late 1995, he was hailed as a peacemaker...