Bertie Ahern has handed in his notice to the President. And so comes to an end an era. Apart from Gerry Adams, who has effectively departed anyway, Bertie Ahern was the last of the Good Friday Agreement leaders to leave. He follows in the footsteps of Hume, Trimble and Blair.Of course, now begins a new era in Irish politics, north and south. Peter Robinson is to take over at the helm of the DUP and we already have Gordon Brown installed as British Prime Minister. The recent problems for the latter will undoubtedly raise questions about whether his two counterparts in Ireland will have similar problems following in the footsteps of such high-profile predecessors. It will be a while yet before we know, with no elections on either side of the border scheduled until next year. In the...
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DUP,
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Taoiseach
A decade has passed since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and things have changed utterly since then for the people of Northern Ireland. Of course, they could have changed a lot earlier had the extremists now in power endorsed the Sunningdale Agreement in the 1970s, but the track record of those slow-learners is now the stuff of the history books.I read Peter Robinson in the News Letter the other day pouring cold water on the Good Friday Agreement, claiming it was a failure. In reality, of course, today's Assembly and governmental institutions are based almost wholly on the 1998 document. The St Andrews Agreement was nothing more than a stage show, a mere poor imitation of the Good Friday Agreement organised at the taxpayers' expense to give the impression that the DUP and Sinn...
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Ian Paisley,
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Seamus Mallon,
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John Hume
No, I'm not talking about the gay rights group which threatened to 'out' a Northern Ireland MP on the same day that North Down unionist parliamentarian Jim Kilfedder happened to die of a heart attack, but rather describing the content of the Guardian's Mandelson interview.Essentially the former Secretary of State said that the British government bent over backwards to keep Sinn Féin happy during political negotiations, despite the latter levelling 'unreasonable' demands.Indeed, Mandelson commented: "If you didn’t give success to the modernisers [i.e. Adams and McGuinness], then power would pass back to the bad men."Hmm. So concessions weren't given on the simple basis that they were good for the people of the north then, but rather because refusal to do so would have possibly sparked...