Power-sharing talks in Scotland next month

The Irish and British governments will attempt to end the political deadlock in the North next month with intensive new talks in Scotland.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair will head up the negotiations involving all sides in advance of the November 24 deadline that has been set to reach a settlement.

Northern Secretary Peter Hain confirmed today that the talks will take place at a location outside the North and, although no venue has been chosen, it is 99% certain Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams will be meeting somewhere in Scotland in a bid to get the power-sharing institutions in Belfast up and running again.

This will be the third time the parties have met for intensive discussions in Britain since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. Both previous attempts ended in failure.

The first session was at Weston Park in the Midlands in July 2001. The then Northern Secretary John Reid suspended the Northern Assembly in October of the following year amid allegations of an IRA spy ring operating inside Stormont.

The parties met again at Leeds Castle near Maidstone, Kent, in September 2004 but were still unable to agree.

The talks in Scotland are likely to begin some time around the week beginning October 9, just days after the International Monitoring Commission, the body set up by the two governments to monitor the IRA and loyalist paramilitary ceasefires, delivers its latest assessment.

With four acts of IRA decommissioning and a declaration by the Provisionals in July last year that their campaign was definitely over, Dublin and London are fairly confident, at this stage, there will be no evidence in the next IMC report on paramilitary activity, which could threaten to delay the negotiations.

It will be critical, but some political representatives, particularly on the Unionist side, believe it could be early next year before a deal is hammered out.

Mr Hain, however, insisted today that the governments will not be going back on the November 24 deadline for devolution. Salaries and other allowances for elected representatives would stop if an agreement was not reached, he warned.

At Stormont Castle, Mr Hain said: “The onus is absolutely on the parties to make it work and make that prize their own.

“Only the parties can travel the distance and complete the journey. It is down to them.”

He added that the British government had done all it could to build confidence and said the relatively peaceful marching season had helped lay the groundwork for a successful round of negotiations.

Mr Hain confirmed: “Critical negotiations will take place outside of Northern Ireland. We need to concentrate minds.

“I think it’s much better to get away from the day-to-day issues and daily pressures that face all politicians.

“This will be a working conference of intense negotiations. This is not some kind of stately home exercise for its own sake.”

Mr Hain said any agreement would herald a new era for the North and urged politicians to grasp the opportunity to move forward.

“I am not trying to bulldoze anybody into doing anything that they don’t want to do.

“I believe it would be the people of Northern Ireland who will have lost out (if power-sharing is not restored) because democracy will have lost out.”