W2E-001 Ulster editorials 1-3.txt
MORNING VIEW

Violence must not set the agenda

SDLP leader John Hume's credibility as a constitutional politician is wearing a bit thin these days as he assumes an increasing role as an apologist for the IRA and Sinn Fein.

The Foyle MP's latest intervention on behalf of the Provos throws the gauntlet down to the Government and shores up the republican argument that there will be no peace until dialogue is opened up with the terrorists.

As the IRA mortars Heathrow Airport and murders innocent people on the streets of Northern Ireland, the SDLP and Sinn Fein leaders not surprisingly use a similar form of words to justify the Government parleying with the terrorists, instead of urging them to introduce measures to round them up and bring them to justice.

Hume, maintaining the IRA was only firing blanks at Heathrow Airport, says the Government should launch new talks with Sinn Fein to exploit "the best opportunity in 20 years" for peace in Northern Ireland. Adams says the search for peace remains the "greatest challenge facing everyone".

Having schemed for a year on the best way of edging Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom, the pair are now audaciously demanding that the IRA and Sinn Fein be allowed a central role in dialogue that will decide on a political solution here.

The small matter of guns and explosives under the table while the Provos talk "peace" is of no consequence to the two men. Neither is the view of the unionist majority community in the Province whose citizenship would be gravely threatened if such a treacherous assembly line was set up.

Not surprisingly, support for this line is coming from Labour's Kevin McNamara, who believes that IRA/Sinn Fein have not yet totally rejected the Downing Street Declaration. But so far the Government has spurned the overtures, probably not out of conviction - more out of the realisation that such a move would trigger a dramatic deterioration in the climate in Northern Ireland leading eventually to a doomsday situation which would tragically engulf all the people of these islands.

John Hume has significantly moved outside the parameters of the Downing Street Declaration with his demand for talks with the IRA before it calls a permanent cessation of violence and one can only assume that the long-term agenda he is now following for Northern Ireland is identical to the aspirations of those in the Provisional republican movement. The right of the unionist majority to remain British is certainly not part of the scenario he is hatching nor is it in the thinking of those he is finding common cause with these days.

Northern Ireland is being pushed dangerously to the precipice by minority politicians whose form of Irish nationalism leaves little room for accommodation with the greater number of people who believe that their interests are best served in maintaining the Union.

Dictating a political agenda at gunpoint can have no place in a proper democracy and, were the IRA and Sinn Fein to succeed in bombing the Government to the discussion table, it would herald a disastrous watershed in Anglo-Irish affairs.

The Government has got to urgently arrest the situation by making it crystal clear that those engaged in terrorist violence will have no place in any dialogue on the future administration of Northern Ireland, unless they totally renounce violence and surrender their arms, ammunition and explosives.

It must also move on to involve in discussions those parties who believe a meaningful form of government can be created within the constitutional confines of Northern Ireland.
