Word: paisleys
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CONTEXT Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, leaders of Northern Ireland's most hard-line Protestant and Roman Catholic parties, sat side by side for the first time ever and agreed to forge a joint platform for government...
...efforts are complicated by a deadline. The British Government has given the parties until March 26th to strike a deal. If it doesn't happen, they say they will pull the plug on the newly elected Northern Ireland Assembly and start looking at other arrangements for governing the region. Paisley thinks they're bluffing, in part because the deadline is being dictated by Tony Blair's desire to see a decade of effort on Northern Ireland rewarded with a settlement before his impending retirement. British officials tend to think the 80-year-old unionist is the bluffer, believing he wants...
...without knowing if there would be a functioning government coming out the other side or even if their elected representatives would be in a job at the end of the month. Two-thirds of them turned out anyway. The outcome was fairly predictable, in that elderly Protestant preacher Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, who turned IRA gunmen into formidable political operators, tightened their respective holds on the Protestant and Catholic vote. But what happens next is not nearly as easy to forecast. The British and Irish governments are counting on the former enemies cooperating to end the region's political...
...Still, Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, the party led by Adams, have broadly indicated they're willing to work together under rigid power-sharing arrangements. That's encouraging since they're expected to run the region together in a matter of weeks. And they need to talk about the details. The DUP wants more assurances that Sinn Fein has left behind their associates in the IRA and will genuinely support Northern Ireland's police. "Sinn Fein are not entitled to be at the table until they declare themselves for democracy," said Paisley. "I'm a democrat...
...March 17). Whether the deadline works or not, senior members of both Sinn Fein and the DUP believe a deal in inevitable. The strange thing is that's because the voters have now cast polarised politics in concrete. The 1998 Good Friday Accord was built around moderate parties, but Paisley and Adams have now eclipsed them - in practical terms, there's no one else to work with. That might not be a great foundation for a functioning government, but if both sides want to win any more elections, it's the only one they...