N. Ireland gets historic agreement
Unionists, Sinn Féin set to share power
Launching an improbable partnership in Northern Ireland, Rev. Ian Paisley, who long epitomized the "Ulster Says No" hard line of Protestant unionists, and Gerry Adams, a former commander and public face of the Irish Republican Army, agreed yesterday to form a power-sharing government in Belfast.
For the first time , Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Adams, the president of Sinn Féin, sat with each other in a face-to-face meeting. They met at Stormont, the parliament building in East Belfast that was once the symbol of the Protestant unionist one-party rule that the IRA set out to smash 37 years ago.
Not only did Paisley and Adams, once sworn enemies, work out a compromise to set May 8 as the date they will form a power-sharing government at Stormont, they sat side-by-side to issue the executive-in-waiting's first joint initiative, calling on the British government to delay the introduction of water charges in Northern Ireland.
While the agreement amounted to a violation of the deadline set by the British and Irish governments for the power-sharing assembly to be up and running, which was supposed to be yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his counterpart, Bertie Ahern, gladly overlooked that detail. Instead they hailed what they called a historic coda to a decade of peacemaking in what was once Europe's most intractable conflict. Legislation will be introduced in the British Parliament today to accommodate the new target date.
"This has the potential to transform the future of this island," said Ahern, who described yesterday's agreement as "the final steps of the peace process."
"Everything we have done over the last 10 years has been a preparation for this moment," said Blair, who was anxious to bring some closure to the peace process before he leaves office later this year. According to some aides, Blair spent more time on Northern Ireland than on any other issue during his decade in Downing Street, and wants it, not Iraq, to be his lasting political legacy.
Ever since the IRA disarmed in 2005, and especially since January, when Sinn Féin endorsed the reformed police force, Paisley had been under intense pressure to agree to share power with people he had long denounced in Biblical terms as evil. According to officials in both Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists, yesterday's agreement was an example of both sides allowing the other to save face.
Paisley had called the British deadline arbitrary, and had only received backing from his party to enter the executive with Sinn Féin on Sunday. Rather than insist the deadline be met, Sinn Féin was willing to give Paisley some wiggle room, initially seeking a May 1 formation of the government, while Paisley wanted May 15. In an example of the compromise that some had thought the two parties were not capable of, they split the difference and settled on May 8.
President Bush spoke with both Paisley and Adams last week, encouraging them "to take the final steps," a White House official said yesterday.
The images of Paisley, an 80-year-old fundamentalist preacher who once vowed never to talk to Sinn Féin, sitting next to Adams as they explained their agreement were broadcast live across Ireland and Britain to an audience that mostly thought they would never see the day. Adams had on his lapel a lily to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising, which launched a revolution that secured independence for 26 of Ireland's 32 counties.
While they did not shake hands, the two leaders' body language and tone were remarkably respectful of each other and their constituents. Paisley's remarks were magnanimous by his historically antagonistic standards. He said that he and Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, the IRA's former chief of staff, would hold regular meetings prior to May 8, as the first and deputy first ministers of the putative local government. He also said his party and Sinn Féin had agreed to seek a meeting with Blair's expected successor, Chancellor Gordon Brown, to push for more money for the power-sharing government.
Paisley, who had almost always called Adams's party Sinn Féin-IRA, to emphasize what he considered the party's inextricable link to terrorism, pointedly referred only to Sinn Féin yesterday.
Adams, meanwhile, praised what he called Paisley's "unequivocal and welcome commitment to support and participate in" power-sharing. As is his wont, Adams sprinkled his remarks with phrases in the Irish language, something that has traditionally brought guffaws and howls of indignation from Paisley and his colleagues in other settings. Paisley, however, smiled and listened politely, seated an arm's length from a man he has previously described as having consorted with Satan.
Adams at one point translated to English a phrase he uttered in Irish after lamenting the long history of conflict between Protestant unionists who want to remain part of the United Kingdom and Catholic nationalists who aspire to unity with the Irish Republic: "Now, there's a new start, with the help of God."
Both men were speaking from a position of recently increased political power. In the March 8 election for the 108-seat assembly, both the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Féin built on their positions as the parties that represent most Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists, respectively: Paisley's party went from 30 to 36 seats, while Sinn Féin increased from 24 to 28. Both parties turned back challenges from dissidents in their grass roots.
There has been much speculation that even if the two main parties could agree to form a government, their ideological differences and historical baggage would produce perpetual gridlock. But within an hour of meeting face-to-face, the parties had produced a united front on the much-despised water rates.
As it took Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister most hated by the IRA, to take the first serious steps toward a partnership with the Irish government that became a peace process, so it took Paisley, a preacher who equated compromise with treason, to make the final deal with the successors to the IRA.
US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, praised Adams, who turned the IRA away from violence, and Paisley, who brought a skeptical unionist population along, as "the indispensable persons in this historic agreement." 