In another symbolic milestone for Northern Ireland peacemaking, the Irish government met Thursday for the first time with the major hard-line Protestant party in the British province, the Democratic Unionists.
Party leader Ian Paisley, who for decades shunned all political contacts with the Republic of Ireland, played down the significance of the hour-long talks at the Irish Embassy in London with Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and his ministers of justice and foreign affairs.
"Each party put their positions clearly and distinctly," said Paisley, 76, who plans to lead his uncompromising party into a new round of negotiations starting next Tuesday in Belfast.
The talks, involving the British and Irish governments and a half-dozen Northern Ireland parties, are supposed to drive forward key goals of the province's Good Friday accord.
Paisley's party, which opposes most of the 1998 pact, became the largest in Northern Ireland in a Nov. 26 legislative election.
But Ahern called the meeting "important and historic" and, although stressing it was only a starting point for building working relations with Paisley, "it was a good start."
Speaking beforehand, Ahern described it as "an opportunity to get to know each other -- because, quite frankly, we don't know each other very well."
Paisley has spent the past five decades opposing compromise in Northern Ireland. The Protestant denomination he founded in 1951, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, rejects all ecumenical cooperation with Catholics. The Democratic Unionist Party he founded in 1970 has specialized in derailing other Protestant politicians' efforts to cut power-sharing deals with the province's Irish Catholic minority.
The Democratic Unionist triumph in the election means Paisley can block any efforts to form a new Catholic-Protestant administration, the central objective of the 1998 deal. Paisley insists Protestants will not share power with Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party, which finished in second place in the election.
Paisley's first contact with an Irish prime minister was in 1965 -- when he led a group of Protestant protesters throwing snowballs at Sean Lemass, who was making the government's first official visit to Belfast.
Northern Ireland was founded as a British territory in 1920, more than a year before Britain granted self-rule powers to the predominantly Catholic south of Ireland. The southern state gradually gained full independence, and declared itself a republic in 1949.
Protestants determined to preserve Northern Ireland's union with Britain long shunned contact with the Republic of Ireland, citing its territorial claim to the north. But as part of the 1998 deal, Irish voters agreed to remove the claim from Ireland's 1937 Constitution.
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