Sinn Fein leaders approved a date on Saturday for its grass roots to vote on supporting the Northern Ireland police, a threshold event in the party's long march from Irish Republican Army (IRA) bloodshed to government power.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said the Jan. 28 Dublin conference, involving about 2,000 members of the IRA-linked party, could be painful and divisive.
But he urged members to end Sinn Fein's decades-old hostility to the Northern Ireland police as an essential step toward reviving a Catholic-Protestant administration, the central aim of the British territory's Good Friday peace accord.
"I believe that the new beginning to policing promised in the Good Friday agreement is now within our grasp. Sinn Fein wants to get policing right," Adams said.
The decision, taken after a six-hour meeting at a Dublin Airport hotel, received more than the required two-thirds support from Sinn Fein party executives -- many of them IRA veterans, all of them committed to Northern Ireland's eventual ouster from the UK.
The Democratic Unionists, who represent most of the province's British Protestant majority, say they will not take seats in an administration alongside Sinn Fein unless Adams' party convincingly embraces British law and order first.
This move would be as important to the peace process -- and as painful for Irish republicans to make -- as the IRA's 1997 ceasefire and its 2005 decision to surrender weapons stockpiles.
While those two landmarks in peacemaking were the product of years of secret diplomacy with the IRA, this decision will require Adams to win a vote following a one-day debate played out in public.
It won't be easy.
From 1970 to 1997 the IRA killed nearly 300 police and maimed thousands more with snipers' bullets, mortar attacks, booby-trap bombs and point-blank ambushes of off-duty officers in shops, pubs and their homes. Sinn Fein encouraged people in their Catholic power bases to turn to the IRA to sort out complaints about crime, not the police, whose primary job was to stop the IRA.
To this day, the predominantly Protestant force -- undergoing a 10-year reform program as part of the Good Friday deal -- is treated as an alien presence in Adams' power base of Catholic west Belfast and along Northern Ireland's meandering 500km border with the Irish Republic.
Adams and his closest party allies planned to spend the next two weeks briefing rank-and-file members on what the leadership's pro-police motion will mean -- and what Sinn Fein expects from Britain and the Democratic Unionists in return.
The Jan. 28 debate and vote is two days before Britain's scheduled date to dissolve the Northern Ireland Assembly in advance of a March 7 election.
Britain would expect the newly elected assembly to form a four-party, 12-member administration on March 14 and receive control of Northern Ireland government departments on March 26.
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