Gerry Adams issues devolution challenge

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams today challenged claims that the British and Irish governments did not know republicans’ bottom line in the negotiations to restore devolution at Stormont.

Following a meeting with SDLP leader Mark Durkan, Mr Adams called on “the anonymous briefers” of Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy to join him in a television studio to publicly discuss their claims.

As a hectic round of meetings aimed at producing a formula for implementing the Good Friday Agreement took place in Belfast and Dublin, the Sinn Fein leader said: “Let them come forward here.

“Let them come forward and ask them did they receive a document from us before Christmas?

“If Paul Murphy – I know Mr (Prime Minister Tony) Blair is busy with other things – wants to come forward to debate this out. Because it is not the way to do business.

“They have not tied this down in terms of Mr Blair’s October speech. He said he wanted acts of completion, well let him complete the act of implementing the Good Friday Agreement.”

The West Belfast MP said Sinn Fein was still trying to establish what the government was prepared to do in an implementation plan on a whole range of areas including policing, demilitarisation and equality.

He said the government had previously made pledges in the summer of 2001 on a whole range of issues after Weston Park talks.

“Look at Weston Park,” he said. “What did they declare at Weston Park? That they were going to deal with on the runs (paramilitaries who have fled Northern Ireland to avoid prosecution), did they deal with them?

“They said that they were going to deal with a process they called normalisation five years ago, did they do so?

“They said they were going to bring about a new beginning to policing, have they done so?

“They said that they were going to make a justice system which would be representative of the community which it is supposed to serve and would be accountable, they didn’t.

“So there are piles of public statements from the government, you could paper the walls of this Great Hall at Stormont with government statements, but we need delivery and we need transparency and we need time-framed, do-able commitments by the government that they are going to fulfil their obligations.”

Mr Adams said it was not a question of republicans taking another leap of faith for the process.

“We have taken so many leaps of faith that we are almost like kangaroos,” the West Belfast MP claimed.

“What we need to do is to do business like the way you and I would do business.

“If you want to buy something, you want to sell something, if you want to make some sort of arrangement with your neighbours or make some arrangement in your work relations, you do it in a simple, straightforward way.

“This process is complicated for one reason and one reason only. It is a process of change, a process which has the capacity to transform this part of Ireland and thus the entire island and the relationship between the two islands but there is resistance to that.

“There is also a problem for those in the British establishment that Sinn Fein was supposed to be an anaemic group in the middle of all of this, but in fact Sinn Fein has, in many ways, been an engine for the process of change.”