NORTHERN IRELAND POWER-SHARING AGREEMENT RECEIVES BROAD WELCOME

Britain, Ireland and the United States on Tuesday welcomed a deal to end almost two years of political deadlock in Northern Ireland that will, for the first time, hand the territory’s top leadership role to Sinn Fein, a party that mainly represents Roman Catholic voters committed to a united Ireland.

The breakthrough came in the early hours of Tuesday morning when the Democratic Unionist Party, whose largely Protestant supporters want to remain in the United Kingdom, said it was ready to end a lengthy and crippling boycott of Northern Ireland’s political assembly.

“I believe that all the conditions are now in place for the assembly to return,” said Chris Heaton-Harris, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland on Tuesday.

Claire Cronin, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, said she welcomed the news. “The people of Northern Ireland are best served by a powersharing government in Stormont as outlined in the Good Friday Agreement,” she wrote on social media, adding that President Joe Biden “has long made clear his support for a secure and prosperous Northern Ireland.”

Ireland’s foreign minister, Micheal Martin, said the imminent restoration of power-sharing was “good news” and that he looked forward to working with the assembly in the future.

The deal between the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, and the British government opens the door to a seismic change in the politics of modern day Northern Ireland, where the first minister has, up to now, always been drawn from the ranks of the DUP.

Barring last minute complications, Sinn Fein, which emerged as the largest party in Northern Ireland’s last elections, will now nominate the first minister. The DUP will have to settle for the deputy first minister post, a big symbolic change even if the powers of the holders of those posts are similar.

The unionist party walked out of the Northern Ireland Assembly in February 2022 in protest of post-Brexit trade arrangements laid out in a deal called the Northern Ireland protocol, which imposed checks on goods arriving from mainland Britain.

The restrictions were introduced because Ireland remained in the European Union when the British quit. The system avoided checks at the politically sensitive land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland — a frontier where violence flared during the decades of sectarian strife, known as the Troubles, which largely ended after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.