Partnership politics 'needed to break deadlock'
Practical politics must be adopted if a deal is to be struck to restart Northern Ireland‘s power-sharing regime, it was claimed today.
Foreign Affairs Minister Brian Cowen said it was time for party chiefs to take sensible steps towards partnership politics and break the deadlocked process.
“The fact is that we can do a lot more together than we have been capable of doing in the past, but we need practical, sensible politics. We don‘t need systems overload,” Mr Cowen said.
“The quid pro quo if you like for stability is also practical politics and no-one should fear it.”
Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy is to chair showdown talks at Hillsborough Castle on Tuesday to plot the next step forward for the six-year-old Good Friday Agreement.
Mr Cowen claimed steps taken during crunch talks at Leeds Castle in Kent offered the framework for a way forward, but said no surreptitious deals were in place to ensure parties stayed on board.
Unprecedented levels of IRA decommissioning were on offer at the talks but a breakthrough foundered on the Democratic Unionist Party‘s insistence that the 1998 Belfast accord should be altered.
“We see the outline of a comprehensive agreement on all matters in a way which people would not have thought possible five or 10 years ago and that’s because we have seen the work of this Agreement,” Mr Cowen said.
“It’s (the Agreement’s) potential is far greater than what has been achieved thus far.
“People need to take the lead in their hands and go for it and I think that there is sufficient for everybody in all respects to bring about the sort of partnership politics which has not been a feature sufficiently of Northern Ireland politics in the past and that is the way forward.
“There is a serious engagement going on. People are striving very hard to find an accommodation,” Mr Cowen said.
But Mr Cowen said if an accommodation was to be reached in the coming days it had to support the principles of democratic politics through partnership and equality.
He said all sides were aware of the challenge the outcome of last November Assembly elections posed – with the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein emerging as the two main parties in the north.
And he claimed what people wanted more than anything was peace and the chance to prosper.
“People want to see an end to violence, all the capability and capacity. They want to see politics being liberated from the circumstances which brought about the conflict in the past,” he said.
Mr Cowen said the chance was there to finalise a deal to allow politics to breathe, and let the people of Northern Ireland work and prosper together.
“Now we are at a point where there is a vista opening up, a political vista that would have been unthinkable a decade ago,” Mr Cowen said.
