British premier Brown confronts Belfast deadlock
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pressed rival Catholic and Protestant leaders Monday to end the deadlock threatening their power-sharing government, the central pillar of Northern Ireland peacemaking.
Brown spent the day at Stormont, the government center in east Belfast, trying to persuade leaders of the British Protestant majority to stop blocking his plans to transfer responsibility for Northern Ireland’s justice system to local hands.
First Minister Peter Robinson, the Protestant leader of the coalition, said he would not be rushed — either by Brown or by the Irish nationalists of Sinn Fein, his uneasy partners atop a 2-year-old government.
But signaling his determination to reach a deal, Brown decided to keep negotiating with both sides Tuesday back at his Downing Street office in London. He gave Robinson a lift on his government jet.
Control over the police and courts was the only important power retained by London in 2007, when former foes forged an unlikely Belfast coalition, setting aside four decades of hostility and a conflict that left 3,700 dead.
But tensions — and the risk of a government collapse as a wider United Kingdom election looms — are rising again. Sinn Fein accuses Robinson’s Democratic Unionists of deliberately delaying progress and pushing their coalition to breaking point.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander who is Sinn Fein’s top official in the government, said Robinson must “face down” the “angry men within his party who are determined to destroy the institutions.”
Robinson made light of those accusations.
“I have not seen any angry men in the DUP,” he said, referring to his Democratic Unionist Party. “I have seen some irritable characters in Sinn Fein.”
Sinn Fein insists that gaining local control of justice matters will be the only way to secure Catholic support for law and order. Otherwise, Sinn Fein warns, it will prove impossible to isolate Irish Republican Army dissidents, who still are trying to kill police officers more than a decade after the IRA declared a cease-fire.
McGuinness said he wanted to “press on to face down the criminals in our society who take advantage of the fact that there is not a local (justice) minister.”
Robinson and McGuinness accuse each other of adopting hard-line positions in advance of the next U.K. elections, which must happen within the next eight months. The Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein want to keep ownership of most of Northern Ireland’s 17 seats in Parliament in London.
Both hope to impress voters by securing a negotiating triumph over their rivals in government. For Sinn Fein, ending London’s oversight of the police and courts would be a vote-winner — even though the party already has conceded that the first justice minister will not be a Sinn Fein figure.
For Robinson, victory would mean winning mammoth money from Brown. Democratic Unionist negotiators are demanding 600 million pounds ($1 billion) from London to launch the Justice Department.
Robinson said Brown is increasing Britain’s funding promises behind closed doors. He said the “terms obviously have improved.”
“We are talking about huge sums of money,” agreed McGuinness.
Brown made no public comments Monday.
He last visited Belfast in March when IRA dissidents killed two soldiers and a policeman. They were the first killings of British security forces in Northern Ireland since 1998, the year of the peace accord that proposed power-sharing.
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