Irish foreign minister hails talks over bid to rescue power-sharing

IRISH FOREIGN minister Simon Coveney and Karen Bradley will meet again next week in the hope of making progress on the powersharing deadlock.

Mr Coveney, who flew into London from a visit to the Middle East to meet the newly appointed Northern Ireland Secretary, said the talks had been “very good” and he expected they were “going to work very well together”.

The Irish deputy prime minister said there remained “significant challenges” but both governments wanted to find a way to resolve the stand-off.

He said yesterday: “Everybody knows that there are time constraints in terms of the work that we need to do but also I think everybody agrees that we want devolved government again in Northern Ireland.”

The meeting came after a week where political relations in Northern Ireland were further strained, this time by controversies around the 1976 Kingsmill massacre in south Armagh.

Mr Coveney attacked the “really, really stupid and insensitive” actions of Sinn Fein MP Barry McElduff, who posted a social media video of him with a Kingsmill branded loaf on his head on the anniversary of an atrocity that saw republican paramilitaries shoot dead ten Protestant workmen. Mr McElduff, who apologised and insisted the video was not a reference to the massacre, was suspended by Sinn Fein for three months.

Unionists reacted angrily, both to the post and the extent of Sinn Fein’s punishment, and the incident appeared to further reduce the already bleak prospects of a deal to restore power-sharing.

The situation was exacerbated on Wednesday when a number of unionist politicians retweeted a graphic satirical cartoon.