Assembly collapse looks imminent
McGuinness, along with Bairbre de Brún and
Caoimmhghín Ó Caoláin, will accompany Sinn
Féin President Gerry Adams MP to meet British Prime
Minister Tony Blair in Downing Street this morning. They will
tell Tony Blair that the British government should not act
outside the Good Friday Agreement by suspending the political
institutions or expelling Sinn Féin from the Executive, as
Trimble has demanded. They will also express their outrage at the
PSNI raid on the party's offices last Friday and about the
charges that have followed.
Speaking at a press
conference on Wednesday, Adams said: "The job of the British
government is to minimise the damage that will be done by any
exodus of the unionists.
"Blair has been good on the issue. Now is the time for hands of history and for him to show that he is a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement."
On Monday, Gerry Adams led a Sinn Féin delegation to meet Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Ahern has already rejected suspension as an option, and Sinn Féin urged him to strengthen that position.
They pointed out to Ahern also that it is absolutely essential that politics works and politics be seen to work and that key to all of that is the continuation of the institutions established under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
The meetings took place against a backdrop of nationwide protests by Sinn Féin in the wake of the latest crisis to hit the peace process. It began with the UUC meeting two weeks ago when the Ulster Unionists decided they were now an anti-Agreement party. This position was subsequently bolstered by morning raids on houses in Belfast and on Sinn Féin's Stormont offices last Friday, culminating in charges against four people.
Last week, the PSNI, and whoever else authorised the raid on Sinn Féin offices in Stormont, beneath the smokescreen of an alleged republican spy ring within the NIO, provided just sufficient political cover for rejectionist unionism to walk away from the Agreement without taking the blame.
But as Martin McGuinness has pointed out, "however long it takes, unionists are coming back to the Agreement, an inclusive agreement with Sinn Féin in government in Stormont and within the North-South institutions.
"Whether they like it or not, the rejectionist unionists are going to have to accept the fact that the Good Friday Agreement is the only show in town," said Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness on Wednesday.
The party's chief negotiator was responding to a call by the Ulster Unionist Party leader and First Minister David Trimble for a motion to exclude Sinn Fein from the power-sharing Executive. The UUP wants the motion to be tabled in Stormont by the British government next week and has threatened to collapse the institutions by resigning if their demands are not met.
On Wednesday afternoon, the SDLP's Mark Durkan said such an expulsion was unacceptable to his party in the absence of a proven case.
"It is important that people, particularly people in positions of political leadership, recognise that we should not be surrendering ground to either the unionist rejectionists or loyalist paramilitaries, who are killing each other and trying to kill Catholics," said McGuinness.
"Politics has to be made to work and it is the job of political leaders to keep the institutions up and running and dealing with any problems. There have been many problems for republicans during this process, but we have not walked away.
"If unionists walk out of the people's institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement they would be sending a very negative message to those malign forces out there who wish to destroy the process.
"This is an imperfect process," said McGuinness. "But if you consider where we are now compared to where we were ten years ago, this is a far better place.
"I have no doubt whatsoever that if we continue to work at it in a genuine, positive and constructive way, where we will be in ten years' time will be a far better place than where we are now.
"Unfortunately, as a result of the Ulster Unionist Council meeting, they have sent a very powerful message to me as an elected representative of the largest nationalist party in the North and that is that they don't want the political institutions to work and they want to withdraw from the institutions."
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