NI elections to go ahead in March
Assembly elections in Northern Ireland will go ahead as planned on March 7th, the British and Irish prime ministers announced last night.
Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern said there was “no reason for any further delay” in implementing the next stage of the timetable included in the St Andrews agreement to restore devolved power to Stormont.
The announcement, which followed talks between the two men at Downing Street, came as the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) published its latest report into terrorist activity in Northern Ireland.
It concluded that the IRA was keeping to its pledge 18 months ago to give up paramilitary activity, saying that “terrorism and violence have been abandoned”.
In a joint statement, Mr Blair and the taoiseach said: “There has been significant and welcome progress since St Andrews and we remain fixed in our determination to see shared government returned to the people of Northern Ireland.”
They welcomed the decision by the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis to support the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and said that combined with the IMC report, it provided “further important reassurance that Northern Ireland has moved on”.
“Our purpose now is to ensure that Northern Ireland can build on all of these positive developments through the restoration of shared accountable government committed to serving all of the people. There is no reason for any further delay,” they said.
Assembly elections were an “integral part of the process”, the statement said, by providing legitimacy to the St Andrews agreement and providing a new assembly to form a power-sharing executive on March 26th.
But the two leaders warned that if either Sinn Fein or the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) did not fulfil their obligations under the agreement, in participating in power-sharing and backing the police, the elections could still be cancelled.
“It would be unreasonable to expect the people of Northern Ireland to continue with an election to an assembly which would not exist,” they said.
The DUP gave a cautious welcome to Sinn Fein’s decision to support policing and deputy leader Peter Robinson issued a similarly careful response to yesterday’s IMC report.
“As a consequence of continued DUP pressure and our insistence that all paramilitary and criminal activity must be ended for good, further movement along the road has been achieved,” he said.
“However we want to ensure that all paramilitary and criminal activity has ended and a successful transition has been completed. Nothing less than exclusively peaceful and democratic means will be acceptable.”
