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N. Ireland talks in crucial phase

graphic April 5, 1998
Web posted at: 1:32 p.m. EDT (1732 GMT)

DUBLIN, Irish Republic (CNN) -- Key players in the Northern Ireland peace process were holding a series of increasingly intense talks Sunday in an effort to meet Thursday's deadline for reaching a draft agreement on the political future of the British province.

Presented with what is seen as Northern Ireland's best chance for peace ever, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern sought to iron out big differences between the British-ruled province's bitterly divided politicians.

"I will throughout the day be having meetings with the unionists, the nationalists, the loyalists and the republicans," Ahern told reporters.

Blair
Blair  

"As we get down to these remaining days, we are determined ... to crack the outstanding difficulties, of which there are many," Ahern said.

Ahern and British leader Tony Blair said Saturday they were optimistic that the negotiating parties involved in the roundtable talks could meet the deadline for an agreement before the Easter holiday.

"People have really worked intensely for six months and there was a deadline of next week, a deadline for referendum, and hopefully we can achieve that because it requires our close cooperation and it requires all the other party leaders also," Ahern said.

"We are absolutely determined to meet the deadline," Blair said.

In January, the British and Irish governments outlined the most likely compromise.

They called for Protestant and Catholic politicians to form a stable Northern Ireland administration -- a proposal supported by Protestants.

But the Anglo-Irish proposal also calls for the administration to cooperate with the Irish Republic in a new cross-border council -- a political arrangement seen as the key goal of the Catholic bloc.

The chairman of the talks, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, has worked with the two main parties -- the Ulster Unionists on the Protestant side and the Social Democratic and Labor Party on the Catholic side -- in hopes of striking a workable compromise.

If the proposed cross-border council is given substantial powers, as both the SDLP and Sinn Fein demand, there's a great risk that majority Protestant opinion would reject the whole accord. That happened in 1974, the only previous time such a compromise was attempted.

But if an agreement has a reformed Northern Ireland administration too firmly at its center, the fear is that the Irish Republican Army -- or a section of it -- will resume bombing and shooting.

Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA's political wing Sinn Finn, says he will support a deal only if it can be sold as "transitional" to a united Ireland.

Speculation is mounting that IRA commanders will secretly meet this week to decide whether to extend their 8-month-old truce beyond Easter.

Easter -- which falls on April 12 this year -- is a key date on the IRA calendar. Today's leaders take inspiration from rebels who seized several buildings in Dublin, then the capital of an Ireland united under British rule, on Easter Monday in 1916. British forces routed the rebels and executed their leaders.

 
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