The British governor of Northern Ireland said on Saturday it was still possible to revive a Catholic-Protestant administration, despite the electoral triumph of a Protestant party opposed to the peace pact that proposed power-sharing.
Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy, who was one of the key negotiators behind the landmark Good Friday accord in 1998, said the rise of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party would make the effort much more difficult -- but not impossible.
"The agreement is not dead, because most people in Northern Ireland want it to work. I am not underestimating the difficulties, but I am not unhopeful that we can make progress," said Murphy, who met separately on Saturday with leaders of the other three major Northern Ireland parties. He planned to meet today with the Democratic Unionists.
Results from Wednesday's election to the Northern Ireland Assembly gave the Democratic Unionists 30 seats, up 10 from the last election in 1998. The Ulster Unionists -- traditionally the major Protestant party, but bitterly divided by the peace deal -- retained 27, down one.
Changes were almost as dramatic on the Irish Catholic side of the house. Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party reviled by many Protestants, stormed ahead of its moderate rivals from the Social Democratic and Labor Party. Sinn Fein won 24 seats, up six, while the SDLP retained 18, down six.
The leaders of both Catholic-backed parties, Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and the SDLP's Mark Durkan, appealed to Murphy to convene the newly elected Assembly immediately.
Durkan, speaking outside Murphy's official Hillsborough Castle residence, said Britain "must not let the DUP hold back progress or turn the clock back on change."
Adams agreed, saying Paisley shouldn't be allowed to exercise "a veto over progress."
But Murphy said convening the Assembly now would only cause more problems. He noted the lawmakers' first legal duty would be to elect the top two administration figures -- one each from the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein.
Under terms of the Good Friday accord, those two top figures must be elected with support from majorities on both sides of the Assembly. While both Catholic parties back power-sharing, that majority no longer exists on the Protestant side.
If the Assembly deadlocked over the matter, he said, "automatically we [would] have to call another election. Now clearly there's no appetite for calling another election straightaway."
Adams said his party accepted Ian Paisley's mandate, but he ridiculed the Democratic Unionists for saying they wanted to negotiate a new form of Northern Ireland administration but wouldn't talk to his party.
"They say they want to renegotiate. Who are they going to renegotiate with if not with us?" Adams said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the