Word: irelanders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ireland is a deceptively beautiful place, soft and green, north and south. Its people, north and south, are deceptively kind and civil and wise. Deceptive, because in the hills and valleys of this island, and among its tribes and clans, vicious hatred and ugly violence have raged for centuries, inflicting unending death and suffering that have come to seem the very price of living in such a lovely place...
...last week, in one of those apparent miracles of the late 20th century--like the end of the cold war and the surrender of apartheid in South Africa--some of the awful weight of that Irish history was lifted. The governments of Britain and Ireland and the key political leaders of the warring factions in Northern Ireland, with major assistance from Bill Clinton and former Senator George Mitchell, agreed to replace terrorism with democracy and to let the people of the North decide their own ultimate fate...
...agreement, hammered out over 22 months of difficult and risky bargaining and concluded in a marathon 32-hour negotiating session captained by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose country was the source of much of the torment of Ireland, permits those who want a united Ireland to work for that goal through politics, not guerrilla warfare, and permits those who want to keep Northern Ireland part of Britain to retain that status until a majority of those in the North decide otherwise. It was not lost on the parties who signed up for peace last week that the agreement came...
...sectarian conflict. Protestant unionists, whose opposition to any change in the province's status as part of Britain once drove them to decorate Belfast city hall with a giant banner declaring ULSTER SAYS NO, agreed not only to share power with Catholic parties in a new Northern Ireland assembly but also to work together with ministers and politicians from Dublin in new cross-border government bodies, which look suspiciously like the first steps toward a united Ireland. And politicians from Catholic nationalist and republican parties--including Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which for years...
...leader and chief negotiator of the Progressive Unionists. "But I have the guts to face Sinn Fein." For his pains he has been called a traitor to unionism by the likes of Ian Paisley, the blunderbuss leader who has made a career of fanning hatred in the North of Ireland and who refused to participate in the talks. Paisley's recalcitrance left him with no role other than leading a pathetic midnight protest outside the gates of the final negotiations and, with luck, a permanent position on the outer fringes of Northern Ireland politics...