Word: iras
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...IRA's onetime reputed chief of staff won't have the police to bad-mouth any more. Long suspected of directing bombings across Ireland and Britain while also operating as one of the main spokesmen for Sinn Fein, the group's political wing, McGuinness, 56, used his veteran's status over the weekend to propose that a special Sinn Fein convention support Northern Ireland's police force for the first time in the party's - or Ireland's - history...
...McGuinness' transformation from armed radical to potential statesman mirrors the journey his fellow Irish republicans have been on since the IRA declared a cease-fire in 1994. Under the strategic direction of Adams, republicans have turned the IRA, one of the world's toughest terrorist organizations, into a viable political force...
...They say their objective is still a united Ireland, but instead of storming British bastions, they're being voted into them. On the way Sinn Fein, once the junior partner to the IRA, became the dominant arm. They've overtaken rivals to become the major Catholic party in Northern Ireland, and they may soon be influential enough in the Irish Republic to earn a minority position in government there...
...Sinn Fein has moved away from its hard-core principles without causing a major internal rift. Twenty years ago they started taking up most of the posts they were elected to, reversing a refusal to recognize elected bodies on either side of the Irish border. In September 2005 the IRA got rid of its weapons, implicitly acknowledging that politics was the only way forward. And now, after a substantial program of police reform that dropped a lot of the force's British associations, brought in tougher human rights standards and encouraged more Catholics to join up, they are prepared...
...another chilling possibility was yet to be raised: that none of it had happened at all. In January, after an 18-month preliminary hearing that was the longest in California history, a judge ruled that the prosecution of the seven could go forward. But a week later District Attorney Ira Reiner dropped all charges against five of the defendants, calling the evidence against them "incredibly weak." The two remaining accused, Raymond Buckey, 28, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 60, were to be tried last month. Now their day in court has been postponed and the case against them thrown...