Back at the brink
The Northern Ireland peace process hit a rut last week when David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), declared his dissatisfaction with the latest faze of the IRA decommissioning programme. In a statement, Trimble announced that his party was "in effect now putting the sequence on hold."
Such plans to delay the current round of negotiations come after a week of seemingly fast-moving progress aimed at finding a lasting solution to the problems surrounding the province.
Bertie Ahern, the Irish taoiseach, held a meeting with Tony Blair at the European Union Council gathering in Brussels last week. From this, a timetale of five days to reach a breakthrough and establish a programme to restore devolution was put forward. The Northern Ireland Assembly has been suspended since last October amid allegations of intelligence gathering by the IRA at the Northern Ireland Office.
At the time, Trimble had declared that "this conspiracy was ten times worse than Watergate". Given the severity of his language, it may have appeared surprising to some that, until yesterday, the UUP leader was so readily engaged in talks with the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.
However, to others the moves of the last few weeks can be seen to have not come soon enough. The original date for elections to reinstate the Northern Ireland governing body was missed last May, despite "intense behind-the-scenes-negotiations", as reported at the time by the BBC.
The sticking point then, as it is now for unionists, concerned the IRA’s paramilitary activities. The unionists have repeatedly called for ‘acts of completion’ with regard to decommissioning, and a clear statement from the IRA that ‘the war is over’.
Following the signing and popular ratification of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which outlined how devolution would work in Northern Ireland, and international committee, headed by General John de Chastelain, was established to oversee the timetable of weapons being put beyond use.
General de Chastelain went before the media before last week’s drama to report that he had witnessed a large proportion of IRA weapons being decommissoned at an arms dump one presumes somewhere in the Irish Republic. While the General discolsed that the weapons included "automatic weapons, ammunition, explosives and explosive material" his address was without the depth the UUP had hoped for.
It had been hoped expected that Trimble would subsequently have welcomed the news but instead he complained that the decommissioning lacked transparancy – he said he would call a party meeting next week to review the situation.
This move now threatens the new election date of November 26th that was announced by Tony Blair shortly before Trimble’s dramatic intervention. Republican dependence on elections to reinstate self-government in Northern Ireland, and through this the ‘complete journey’ to the achievement of an Irish Republic, has once more been halted.
Trust remains a problem in Northern Ireland. Both sides have made concessions, but difficulties remain surounding Sinn Fein’s belief that policing reforms have been watered down, the emergence of the Real IRA, and divisions within the Unionist movement which have left Trimble with the necessity to overcome critics within his party, led by Jeffrey Donaldson.
And what will be the outcome if elections do go ahead in November and the more extreme, anti-Good Friday, Democratic Unionist Party led by Ian Paisely overtake the UUP to become the largest unionist party at Stormont, as certain polls suggest is likely? Similarly, Sinn Fein has a chance of triumphing over Mark Durkan’s SDLP.
Although this week has proved that progress is possible, it’s also shown that the future, as ever in Northen Ireland, remains uncertain.
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