Deal stalled by IRA photos row
Wednesday, December 8, 2004 Posted: 1753 GMT (0153 HKT)
Blair and Ahern had hoped to announce completion of the deal.
BELFAST, Northern Ireland (CNN) - British and Irish leaders have unveiled a plan to resolve the conflict in Northern Ireland but a standoff over IRA arms decomissioning looks set to dash hopes of a deal. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday the outlawed paramilitary Irish Republican Army would not accept the joint British-Irish proposal that they photograph the decommissioning of their weaponry but withhold publishing the photographs until a power-sharing government is seated next spring.
"The belief on the Unionist side that it is necessary that the decommissioning should be photographed and the photographs published has not been agreed too," Blair said at a news conference in Belfast, where he and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, had hoped to announce completion of the deal. "But for this particular part, indeed it has been agreed," Blair said.
With the IRA balking at that proposal for transparency, the hardline Protestant Democratic Unionist Party said it would not sit with Sinn Fein, the IRA's political ally, in the government. "Roman Catholics and Protestants alike are now saying that the DUP are right, that this should be transparent," the DUP's leader, 78-year-old preacher Ian Paisley, said in Belfast after a meeting with retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, the mediator between the two sides. "The little man behind the garden fence should be sure the IRA is decommissioning."
Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's largest Roman Catholic party, said focussing on the documentation issue distracted "from what has been achieved." "Here today we have the British prime minister telling us that Ian Paisley has said 'yes' ... to every issue "except for one," Adams said. "I do think that is an indication of the progress that has been achieved."
But, he said, he had told the prime ministers at the beginning of the process that the IRA was unlikely to accept the DUP's demand to photographically document the destruction of its weapons. "What's holding it up is the demand for a process of humiliation, and I don't think we should let that hold it up," he said. Adams said Paisley had a history of pushing for the humiliation of the IRA, citing his comments last month that the group must "repent" for its past actions and should be forced to wear "sackcloth and ashes." But, Adams said, he was "confident the IRA will resolve these issues."
"In our view all of the issues of substance have been resolved," he said, noting that his political party does not speak for the IRA. Blair said the issue had "proved impossible to solve at least at the moment," but added that he hoped for "strong public support for the essentials of this ... to get us the last bit of the way." "It's not that I want public pressure so much at the moment, but we owe it to the people of Northern Ireland to tell them what's going on and put the documents out there," he said.
Adams says Sinn Fein should accept the Anglo-Irish package.
Blair and Ahern said the parties had agreed on the end of paramilitary activity, that the decommissioning should be done and that it should be completed by December 25. The two leaders also said the parties had agreed that a power-sharing government would be seated in March, on how to handle Northern Ireland in the intervening period and changes to the Good Friday agreement of 1998 that made the government possible - and bringing Sinn Fein into the policing arrangements.
But the documentation issue kept the two leaders from achieving a comprehensive agreement. "A comprehensive deal is a comprehensive deal, which means all issues are addressed by everyone," Ahern said. "Otherwise, it's a piecemeal deal. ... It is not acceptable that we should fall short."
Paisley said that the IRA had not only refused to agree to the photographic record but had, in fact, agreed to "nothing" and said he would never withdraw "anything I've said about the bloodthirsty monsters of the IRA." "There's no turning back," he said. "We're not going back to the umbras of IRA terrorism, and Mr. Adams and all of his friends had better remember that we are in a new day." Paisley also said the British and Irish governments should "have the guts" to go through with the proposals without the IRA if they refuse to decommission on his terms.
Paisley: Demanding photographic evidence of arms decommissioning.
Blair and Ahern, however, said the agreements so far were a remarkable advance in the process. "Obviously we had wished to be able to present the proposals in the context of full agreement," Ahern said. "(But) we are on the brink of an accommodation that would have been regarded as impossible not that long ago."
More than 3,600 people were killed in three decades of political and religious conflict in Northern Ireland. Although some violence has continued from fringe, splinter groups, the IRA has observed a cease-fire since 1997. The 1998, U.S.-brokered Good Friday agreement set up the power-sharing government and arranged for disarmament of both Protestant and Catholic militant groups. De Chastelain has overseen two earlier disarmaments. But the government collapsed in 2002 when allegations emerged that the IRA had been spying on the British government through its contacts with Sinn Fein.
