Republican News · Thursday 30 January 2003

Ferris spells out crisis at Westminster

BY FERN LANE

Sinn Féin's Martin Ferris was at Westminster on Wednesday 21 January to address a meeting of the Labour Party Irish Society on the crisis in the peace process.

He told the meeting, hosted by Labour MP John McDonnell, that the current round of talks between the parties are possibly the "most important negotiations since 1921". The North Kerry TD urged all those political activists in Britain concerned about the stagnation in the process to use whatever influence they could muster with their own MPs and with the British government to help get it back on track.

There was, he said, a real danger that, despite the hard work of Sinn Féin and the historic gestures made by the IRA, the Good Friday Agreement itself could collapse if there were not determined efforts on the part of everyone to ensure that that does not happen.

One significant cause of the current crisis, he explained, is that the unionist leadership, having signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, then consistently failed to "proactively work to convince the unionist community of the benefits of the Agreement" and constantly pandered to the demands of rejectionist unionists, both within the UUP and the DUP.

This failure of leadership - aided by the indulgence of the British government - has led to four suspensions of the institutions since the signing of the Agreement, each one in turn weakening it. It was this continuous instability and the willingness of the British government to follow the unionist agenda, he said, which has led to the present crisis.