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British, Irish Leaders Unveil Peace Plan
British and Irish leaders published a detailed plan Wednesday for reviving a Catholic-Protestant administration in Northern Ireland — a peace-building project still on hold because of unsolved arguments about IRA disarmament. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern have spent the past year struggling to forge an unlikely agreement between the province's two biggest and most polarized parties: the British Protestants of the Democratic Unionists and the Irish Catholics of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party. Standing together inside Belfast's riverfront concert hall, Blair and Ahern insisted that a deal between the two long-standing enemies was tantalizingly close. They conceded that a breakthrough had been thwarted in part because the IRA refuses to allow photographs of its disarmament to be published _ but they stressed that an eventual deal was inevitable.Posted by: Fred 2004-12-08 |
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