Ahern to meet with DUP
The Irish Government and Reverend Dr Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party will meet next week for talks, it was confirmed last night.
Mr Paisley and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern will meet at the Irish Embassy later next week, possibly Thursday 29th – the first get together since the DUP emerged as Northern Ireland’s largest party in last November’s Assembly elections.
The DUP has substantial political clout, as it overtook the Ulster Unionist Party as the dominant representative of unionism in Northern Ireland.
Since that time three former UUP Assembly members have gone over to the DUP, taking its number of Assembly seats to 33.
The DUP said it intended to participate in the review of the Good Friday Agreement on February 3 and has made plain it wants a radical overhaul of the 1998 peace accord.
Separately, the Catholic SDLP said yesterday it hoped the Irish and British governments would press ahead with further cementing the Good Friday Agreement.
The SDLP said next month’s review should neither be “prolonged” nor renegotiated.
And Sinn Fein concurred. Bairbre de Brun, Mitchel McLaughlin, Geraline Dougan and Philip McGuigan met with Paul Murphey, the Northern Ireland secretary, at Hillsborough yesterday where they made the case that Sinn Fein would resist any move to make the review “a protracted process or a renegotiation process.”
Sinn Fein said: “The review needs to be short, sharp and focused and it must not become a substitute for working political institutions or for the governments fulfilling outstanding commitments. The Agreement envisaged a review taking place against a background of working political institutions. We emphasised to Paul Murphy the need to lift suspension.’
But the DUP’s deputy leader, Peter Robinson MP urged the SDLP to “stop being a rejectionist party and accept the need for a new fair deal.”
Mr Robinson said: ‘The SDLP seem to have taken leave of their senses. Of all the local parties, one would have thought that the message would have gotten through most clearly to the SDLP.
“The November Assembly election showed that the Belfast Agreement is dead, yet the SDLP appear unwilling to assist in its burial. Instead they wish to breathe new life back into an Agreement which cannot work because the majority of unionists have rejected it as the way forward for Northern Ireland.”
