SDLP resists bid to oust Sinn Fein
Unionist moves to oust Sinn Fein from government in Northern Ireland will not receive the nationalist SDLP’s crucial backing, the Labour Party conference heard tonight.
Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble and the anti-Good Friday Agreement Democratic Unionists have both tabled motions calling for republican ministers to be excluded from the power-sharing Executive over the IRA’s failure to disarm.
But the SDLP’s Stormont Agriculture Minister Brid Rodgers told delegates that the rival motions were more about internal competition than achieving decommissioning.
She said: ‘‘The move to exclude Sinn Fein is wrong and runs totally contrary to the Good Friday Agreement. The SDLP will resist it.’’
Mrs Rodgers also warned the Friends of Ireland fringe meeting in Brighton that the peace process was facing its most serious crisis.
‘‘It is truly make or break time,’’ she said.
Putting weapons beyond use remains a confidence building issue for unionists, the Upper Bann MLA said.
But Mrs Rodgers claimed by failing to begin destroying its guns the IRA is playing into the hands of those bidding to wreck the peace process.
Repeating a previous assertion of how vital disarmament by the Provisionals is, she added: ‘‘The IRA, and only the IRA has it within its power to save the Agreement, an Agreement which has been ratified by the people of Ireland.’’
