Britain and Ireland set a deadline Friday to revive Northern Ireland's power-sharing arrangement by September or see the six-year peace process scuttled.
| Yeah, setting a deadline, that'll do it. |
| ... and if they don't make the deadline, by golly, there's another one where that came from! |
Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern could offer no signs of progress after meeting Northern Irish faction leaders in London, but said a breakthrough must come soon. "I think that there is a real recognition ... that it's time to come to the point of decision and make up our minds one way or another, so that at the end of this negotiation we either have a concluded agreement that allows everyone to move forward together or alternatively we are going to have to find a different way," Blair told reporters. "In September, if we can't find a way to make this process work ... we would then conclude that we can't really make progress in the way we've envisaged," he said.
| Maybe you need a roadmap? I know where you can find one nobody's using. |
"Faith, Mike! An' what kinda roadmap is this?"
"I dunno, Pat. Where's Sheboygan?" |
Ahern said: "We're not there now, but we have to in September."
"It would be bad."
"How bad?"
"Very bad."
"As bad as crossing the beams?"
"Not that bad." |
Northern Ireland's power-sharing local government, set up under the historic 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, has been suspended since October 2002. Elections since then gave victories to hard-line mainly Roman Catholic nationalists, who oppose British rule of the province, and mainly Protestant unionists, who support it. Any deal to revive devolution would involve new peace commitments and acts of disarmament from the Irish Republican Army nationalist militia, in return for the scaling back of Britain's military presence and an amnesty for guerrillas. Hard-line unionists have refused to serve in a power-sharing government alongside the IRA's political front allies, Sinn Fein.
| Sniff, smells like quagmire to me. Maybe John Kerry could help, he was in Vietnam, you know. |
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