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Irish power-sharing to be determined soon

Britain closed down the Northern Ireland Assembly at the stroke of midnight yesterday and planned a new election that will determine the fate of power-sharing, a long-elusive aim of the province's peace accord.

The official dissolution of the 108-member assembly -- which was elected in 2003 but failed to form a cross-community administration -- will permit rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic parties to campaign for stronger mandates in the run-up to a March 7 election.

The governments of Britain and Ireland want the new assembly to form a strong Catholic-Protestant coalition a week later and receive control of most of Northern Ireland's government departments March 26 -- a deadline that both governments insist will not be moved.

Deepening peace

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern were expected to confirm the election timing when they met yesterday afternoon at Blair's Downing Street office.

Both governments also planned to unveil a new report documenting the deepening peace commitments of the Irish Republican Army, which in 2005 disarmed and officially abandoned its decades-old effort to overthrow Northern Ireland by force. Since then, the report is expected to confirm, IRA members have steadily retreated from violence and involvement in criminal rackets.

Such moves are critical to the revival of power-sharing. The major Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists, refuses to cooperate with the IRA-linked Sinn Fein, which represents most Catholics, citing its refusal to accept British law and order.

That supposedly changed on Sunday night when a special Sinn Fein conference voted overwhelmingly to open normal relations with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, overturning decades of official hostility. However, Sinn Fein's motion made its support for the police conditional on the Democratic Unionists accepting the March 26 deadline.

`Significant'

Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley -- a hardline evangelist who since the start of Northern Ireland's conflict four decades ago has opposed compromise with Catholics -- admitted that the Sinn Fein move was significant because the once-revolutionary party appeared to be accepting the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and its institutions.

"We have made headway. I wouldn't deny that," Paisley said. "If you had told me 20 years ago that they would be repudiating the very fundamentals of Sinn Fein-IRA, I would have laughed. But that is what they have done."

But Paisley said his party would not share power by the deadline unless Sinn Fein first began to tell police about crimes and encouraged young Catholics to join the mostly Protestant force.
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