‘Big, big onus on Tony Blair’
PEACE PROCESS U.K. must deliver on promised police reforms, visiting Sinn Fein leader tells Kenneth Kidd
he British government must start delivering on promised
reforms of Northern Ireland’s Protestant- dominated police agencies if the stalled peace process is to move forward, says Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.
“ The policing thing is done and dusted,” Adams said in an interview yesterday.
“ What we need on policing is delivery. When they do that, I will go to the Sinn Fein leadership and seek a special meeting of our party.” And it’s up to British Prime Minister Tony Blair to ensure that Unionist leaders loyal to Britain return to the powersharing arrangements laid out in the so-called Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
“ The big, big onus is on Tony Blair,” said Adams.
“ It’s not just an agreement. It’s an international treaty between the Irish and British governments.”
TAs part of the 1998 agreement, power over policing and justice was to have been transferred from London to Belfast and put under civic control. But those moves have been on hold since 2002, when the Northern Ireland assembly and its joint Protestant- Catholic executive were suspended after allegations that a Sinn Fein member of the assembly was part of an Irish Republican Army spy ring.
Sinn Fein — pronounced Shin Fayn, which is Gaelic for “ We Ourselves” — is the dominant political party for Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority and favours leaving the United Kingdom and joining the Irish Republic to the south. Adams was in Toronto to address the annual dinner of Friends of Sinn Fein ( Canada), formed by Toronto lawyer Alan McConnell in 2001.
Although its formal membership is tiny — there are only six members across Canada — Friends of Sinn Fein sold more than 250 tickets, at $ 150 apiece, for last night’s dinner. Adams cancelled a trip to New York for a similar event last week after the U. S. government refused to lift visa restrictions that bar him from fundraising.
( Instead, he spoke to the dinner guests via satellite from Belfast.)
“ I think it’s very stupid,” Adams said of the U. S. decision, which was intended to put pressure on Adams to support a reformed policing service in Northern Ireland, with Sinn Fein endorsement seen as key to political progress in the Britishruled province, political sources in Washington said.
“ I think it was part of a very amateurish effort to shoehorn Sinn Fein on the issue of policing.” Adams is also puzzled because it was at his urging that the IRA agreed this year to give up its armed struggle and decommission its weapons — a process completed last month under the eye of retired Canadian general John de Chastelain.
“ The peace process was going to go into increasing difficulty,” Adams said. “ The atmosphere was quite poisonous and getting worse. It needed a big initiative and we have learned that those who want the most change have to take the most risks.
“But it’s also because some were using the IRA as an excuse not to move ( toward peace) and others are genuinely fearful of the IRA. So, if you take the IRA out of the equation, you remove the excuse.”
His April call on the IRA to abandon its armed struggle came amid mounting public pressure on the outlawed group, which had in recent months been linked to a $50 million bank heist and a brutal killing in a Belfast pub.
Then, last February, the Irish government publicly named Adams as a member of the IRA’s governing “army council” — something security and intelligence agencies have long said privately. Adams, who has consistently denied ever being a member of the IRA, called the laying down of arms “ very courageous” but predicted the decision to disarm “ will take some time for everyone to absorb.”
British and Irish officials are scheduled to hold talks in Northern Ireland later this week. But both the British and Irish governments say formal negotiations on power- sharing won’t resume until after January, when a monitoring commission is set to release its second report on underground IRA activities, including bank robberies and cigarette smuggling. Northern Ireland’s largest Protestant group — the Democratic Unionist Party, led by the firebrand Rev. Ian Paisley — says it will refuse to accept that the IRA has disarmed until it is shown photographic proof. Adams says Paisley, given his position as DUP leader, has to be at the table if power- sharing is to work.
“ He’s the leader of the party. The best deal is the Paisley deal. If he makes the deal, there’s nobody looking over his shoulder, creeping up behind him.
“ Everybody should know, I’d say, by Easter of next year whether or not the DUP are serious.”