- HILLSBOROUGH, Northern Ireland
(Reuters) - Britain seized back the reins of government in Northern Ireland
on Monday amid a crisis in the peace process provoked by a spying scandal,
but vowed to try and restore home rule early next year.
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- After halting the province's power-sharing government
with a stroke of his pen, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid
said he regretted the return of direct rule from London and hoped it would
be "a short-lived impasse."
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- "I hope the decision...marks a breathing space and
a chance in a sense to gather strength and to regather confidence,"
Reid said at his Hillsborough Castle residence outside Belfast.
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- Both the British and Irish governments will now be working
frantically behind the scenes to edge Northern Ireland's politicians toward
a compromise that will allow them to restart the stalled process.
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- British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart
Bertie Ahern, who have both invested much personal and political capital
in the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, said their governments were "saddened"
by Monday's events.
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- In a joint statement, they promised to seek a restoration
of devolution before Northern Ireland Assembly elections next May, and
sent a message to the Irish Republican Army, against whom allegations of
spying precipitated the current crisis.
-
- "It must be clear that the transition from violence
to exclusively peaceful and democratic means...is being brought to an unambiguous
and definitive conclusion," they said.
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- Predictably in the polarized world of Northern Irish
politics, criticism and wrangling was quick to follow Monday's formal suspension
announcement.
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- The hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, led
by preacher-politician Ian Paisley, declared the Good Friday deal over.
Britain should start over again rather than trying to "pump oxygen
into a failed process," Paisley told reporters.
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- THOUSANDS KILLED
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- At the other end of the political spectrum, Gerry Adams,
leader of the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, accused Reid of pandering
to unionists who wanted to see the power-sharing arrangement set up under
the 1998 deal fail.
-
- "It is a serious crisis," he said. "What
he (Reid) is doing is accommodating resistance to the Good Friday agreement."
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- This was the fourth suspension in three years of the
assembly and other Catholic/Protestant power-sharing institutions, and
the feeling was widespread that it will take longer this time to get the
bickering factions back together.
-
- The longest prior freeze of the institutions was three
months and was resolved by an IRA move toward decommissioning.
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- With Protestant unionist parties increasingly skeptical
about continuing to share power with Sinn Fein, claims the IRA was spying
on the British government proved the final straw.
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- After First Minister David Trimble's Ulster Unionist
Party threatened to walk out of the Belfast executive unless Sinn Fein
was expelled, Britain decided to pull the plug before the devolved government
self-destructed.
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- Reinforced by two new junior ministers, Reid's Northern
Ireland Office will take over day-to-day running of the province of 1.6
million people from midnight Monday.
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