The Hillsborough Declaration

Intense negotiations last week involving the Irish and British governments and the main parties in Northern Ireland were halted after failing to break through the current impasse in the peace process. An agreement was supposed to have been reached by April 2 which would have formed the executive of the new Northern Ireland Assembly. Having failed to achieve this, the two governments released the "Hillsborough Declaration" instead, which proposed the outline of a possible agreement and called for negotiations to resume in two weeks, after all parties had had a chance to analyze the proposal.

The crux of the problem now is that different parties claim differing interpretations of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which forms the basis of the political solution to over 25 years of violence in the province. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the largest pro-British party in the province, insists that the spirit of the GFA, if not the letter, requires some IRA decommissioning of weapons before the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party can take the two seats of the ten seat Assembly executive to which it is entitled, due to its share of the vote in Assembly elections last year. Sinn Fein, on the other hand, is equally insistent that this precondition is not part of the GFA and that, furthermore, Sinn Fein has no ability to make the IRA start disarming.

Looking at the letter of the GFA, it is plain that Sinn Fein is correct in stating that IRA decommissioning is not a precondition to Sinn Fein taking its seats in the Assembly's executive. The GFA only requires IRA decommissioning to occur within a period of two years, a time frame which still has a considerable amount of time left to run. This reality is accepted by the Irish and British governments, but they have nevertheless sided with the UUP in demanding some IRA disarmament now.

The reasons for this lie in internal UUP politics. Much of the UUP, and the pro-British unionist population in general, is unsure that the GFA is a good deal for unionists. The leader of the UUP, David Trimble, does believe that it is but he has a big problem in ensuring that the majority of his party goes along with him. It is for this reason that he is so determined that there will be IRA decommissioning prior to Sinn Fein entry into the executive. If he gives ground on this issue, there is a good chance that enough UUP members of the Assembly will become anti-GFA that the Assembly will be made unworkable, and Trimble could possibly be removed as leader of the UUP. The British and Irish governments do not want to see this happen, so they have combined to place immense pressure on Sinn Fein to produce some IRA surrender of weapons now.