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Britain threatens to cancel Northern Ireland elections

Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Hain yesterday threatened to cancel elections in the province if the Protestant and Catholic parties do not re-form a power-sharing government next year.

Hain pressured both sides to make a big effort in order to restore devolved government in the New Year, saying that otherwise the planned 2007 elections to the currently suspended Northern Irish Assembly would be pointless.

"It is essential that there is real political movement within the next year, if the Assembly elections due to be held the year after, in 2007, are to have any meaning," Hain said.

"Every year that passes without a locally accountable assembly working through a power-sharing executive, is a year in which the people of Northern Ireland have to live with a democratic deficit that cannot be justified."

The Democratic Unionist Party, the largest Protestant party, and their Catholic counterparts Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), cannot even agree about talking together.

Protestant and Catholic deputies shared power from December 1999 to October 2002, when the Northern Ireland assembly was suspended amid allegations of IRA spying and a complete breakdown in the trust between the unionist and republican sides.

The province has been run from London ever since.

Hain said that he wanted any forthcoming major decisions to be taken by locally elected politicians rather than his ministry.

The power-sharing Northern Ireland executive and assembly was established after both sides signed the 1998 Good Friday peace deal, which largely ended almost three decades of fierce inter-community violence.

"Unionists need to know that republicans are serious about the commitments that they gave when signing the Good Friday Agreement that they will work through exclusively lawful means," Hain stressed.

"They have to persuade each other that a divided past can eventually become a shared future," he added. "And in 2006, on the issues of unequivocal support for policing and genuine political engagement, inertia is not in anyone's interest."

He also threatened, during an interview, to reduce the ?41,000 (US$70,650) salaries of the 108 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

"I am talking straight rather than tough but if people want to interpret it as being tough that's a matter for them," Hain said, admitting that scrapping an election would be a "pretty big decision" to be taken by next December.

"What I'm saying is: `I want you to run your own affairs, I want to give away power,'" he added.
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