Word: irelands
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...change of heart is both a symptom and a cause of the hope that has settled over Northern Ireland - precisely because the new peace agreement has been brokered among the hardliners of both sides. The peace process had initially been built around moderate parties - David Trimble's Democratic Unionists and the Social Democratic Labor Party of John Hume - but voters from each community gradually opted to be represented at the negotiating table by tougher parties. A majority of Protestant voters thought Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, which had rejected the earlier process, offered the best to chance to stop Sinn...
...raised suggestions that he could turn his attention to a role in the Middle East after leaving office. Blair would be the first to recognize that the solution for one conflict doesn't simply apply to another, but he could, nonetheless, carry some valuable lessons from the Northern Ireland process...
...usually did so only in exchange for an irreversible step by the militants: First they gave up their campaign of violence; then they destroyed their weapons. This year, as one of the final pieces of the jigsaw, Irish nationalists gave up their longstanding taboo against cooperating with the Northern Ireland police...
...flexibility: When Unionists dumped Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble as their leader, Blair adapted the process to bring in Paisley. He also employed "creative ambiguity" to get over the toughest hurdles by letting each side believe they were scoring points. Even today the central question of whether Northern Ireland will ultimately be British or Irish remains unresolved, but the matter will be settled in politics...
...Perhaps more than anything, though, Blair brought patience and determination. Even when more pressing issues of global importance put demands on him, he still devoted extraordinary amounts of time to Northern Ireland - even though it offered him almost no political benefits...