No renegotiation, Ahern tells hardline unionists

The Good Friday Agreement will not be re-negotiated, Bertie Ahern warned hardline unionists today.

He called on all paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland to go out of business, and urged the political parties to intensify efforts to restore suspended devolution.

The Rev Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party declared that the Good Friday accord had failed after Northern Ireland Secretary Dr John Reid’s put the power sharing Stormont Assembly on ice amid allegations of IRA spying.

But Mr Ahern said today: “We will not negotiate backwards and unpick an agreement that is the product of long and difficult negotiations that has been solemnly endorsed by the people of Ireland, North and South.”

Frantic efforts to save the troubled peace process appeared to receive a major setback yesterday when the Provisional IRA issued a statement which seemed to reject Tony Blair’s call for it to disband.

“The important thing for everybody to do is stay calm in this,” Bertie Ahern said.

“The Good Friday Agreement stands and we have to find a model of trust and confidence. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Pressure on the Provisionals to dismantle has been stepped up following a statement from jailed leaders of the splinter Real IRA saying they were calling a halt to their campaign.

The hardline group, which carried out the Omagh bombing in which 29 people died in August 1998, insisted that only a few “criminal elements” who were still at large were intent on continuing.

Mr Ahern gave the statement a guarded welcome, saying: “Anyone that’s disengaging from violence has to be a good thing, from whatever quarter.”

But as he hailed the decision to endorse the Nice Treaty on European expansion he stressed the need for Northern Ireland to put the 30-year conflict behind it once and for all.

“That necessarily involves the withdrawal of all paramilitaries from the scene,” he said.

“Nationalist Ireland has done much to assist the development of a more exclusively political republicanism, though sometimes old habits die hard, unfortunately.”

But the Taoiseach was adamant that it was not only republicans who were standing in the way of progress, saying; “In terms of people being killed or attacked at random on the streets, unionism and the British state still have much to do to persuade extreme loyalism to stop and to create the confidence between the communities at the interface that will lead to complete all-round disarmament and disbandment.”

Mr Ahern, who was at Fianna Fáil’s annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration at the republican graveyard plot in Bodenstown, County Kildare, told unionists that peace could not be achieved by deciding to pull out of sharing power with others.

“If Northern Ireland is to be given the chance to prosper as a political entity, it will require a fuller willingness by a majority of unionists to share power and responsibility with nationalists and republicans,” he said.