Ahern hails new era on visit to Paisley's heartland

Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern today visited Ballymena in the heart of Ian Paisley’s constituency without any loyalist protest.

As he met Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren involved in a Government-backed scheme to tackle sectarianism in the Co Antrim town alongside its Democratic Unionist mayor Maurice Mills, Mr Ahern said the fact that he could visit Ballymena without any fuss was a measure of the political progress that has been made in the North in recent times.