(by C J Miller, Our Town)

Senior US officials called this week's collapse of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government a "set up" and called for its reinstatement as quickly as possible.

Belfast's Stormont Assembly, made up of Catholic and Protestant leaders, was suspended on midnight Monday (Oct 14) and returned to direct rule under Britain, which continues to occupy six counties in Northern Ireland.

Continued objections by unionist leaders, led by Stormont's former First Minister, David Trimble, to sharing power with nationalist leaders led to the government's suspension, US leaders said this week. Political experts around the world have called the collapse of the devolved government a serious threat to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

"This appears to be another attempt by Britain to back up David Trimble," said Republican Congressman Peter King of Long Island, a longtime supporter of the Northern Ireland peace process. "He signed the (Good Friday) Agreement, but he's never defended it. It gets threatened every time Trimb le's political future gets threatened. The agreement has to go forward."

Bruce Morrison, one of four US representatives who brokered the Good Friday accord with then Sen. George Mitchell in 1998, said collapsing the assembly "shouldn't nullify the peace treaty between Ireland and Britain."

"There's a whole lot of the agreement that doesn't depend on the Stormont assembly," Morrison said Tuesday. "The rest of the agreement isn't suspended, including human rights, demilitarization, decommissioning and policing issues. The unionists' perspective is that if we close down the assembly, we close down the agreement. It's a great disappointment, and it's the result of poor leadership in the unionist community."

Members of the Rockland County Chapter of Irish Northern Aid picketed in front of the British Embassy with about 250 others last week, objecting to the government's fourth return to home rule since its establishment under the Good Friday peace accord.

"The unionists are going to do anything possible to break the Good Friday Agreement," said James Teague, vice president of the Rockland County Chapter of Irish Northern Aid. "We wanted to make our voice known that it's up to (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair to stay strong, stop favoring them and not let them do it."

President George W. Bush issued a statement in support of the temporary suspension of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, Reuter's news service reported Monday. King and other senior US officials joined Bush in calling for its reinstatement "as soon as possible."

"They say it's a cooling off period and it's not as odious as returning Northern Ireland to British rule forever," said King, who met with US Special Envoy Richard Haass and Irish and British officials last week. "But I still think collapsing the government is a bad idea. You can't pull it down every time something goes wrong."

In the meantime, two British ministers, Ian Pearson and Angela Smith, were appointed to join Northern Ireland's Secretary of State John Reid in the temporary government to replace Trimble, an Ulster Unionist, and Mark Durkan of the Social Democratic Labor Party, Reuters news service reported Monday. Gerry Adams, leader of the nationalist Sinn Féin party, and its Minister of Education, Martin McGuinness, both lost their jobs as Ministers of Parliament with this week's collapse of Stormont, along with 106 MPs from both unionist and nationalist parties.

British officials say the devolved government will be restored in time for Northern Ireland's general elections next May.

"When governments falter, you call elections. You don't suspend them," Morrison said. "That's the form we use in democracy for debate. In the absence of that debate, politicians are not held accountable. That's not true democracy."

Sinn Féin won unprecedented four new seats in the Republic of Ireland last spring, making it the fastest growing political party in the country. British officials said the north/south governing body would not be affected by the suspension of Stormont.

"That's part of the reason the unionists are so uncomfortable," King said.

"The elections must be held next May and when they are, I'm sure the two top parties will be Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party." DUP leader Ian Paisley has been one of the most vocal Trimble detractors, calling for the first minister's resignation because of his inability to oust Sinn Féin from the cooperative government.

Last week's raids on the Stormont offices of Sinn Féin by the former Royal Ulster Constabulary, now known as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, supposedly yielded documents said to "be of use to terrorist organizations," several British news services reported. Although no evidence has been produced, four members of Sinn Féin, including a Stormont messenger, are being held on charges of possession of the documents.

Sinn Féin has been accused of obtaining the information for the Provisional Irish Republican Army, to which it is politically linked. The Provisional IRA has held its cease-fire for the past seven years and has decommissioned a quantity of its remaining weapons twice in the past year.

One week before the raid, unionists, whose feuding paramilitary groups have sparked fresh violence in Belfast this month, called for the IRA to disband.

"Until the paramilitaries whither away, we will have a pretext for people not to participate in politics," Morrison said. "Some unionists can't live without the IRA. It's an excuse not to share power with Catholics."

King called the timing of the demand for the IRA to permanently disband and the raid on Sinn Féin's Stormont offices "highly questionable."

"This doesn't merit 200 storm troopers storming government offices and collapsing the government," he said Monday. "It's been my experience that British security is pretty tight. How did a messenger get a hold of documents that mean life and death? None of them have been found to be incriminating. I have a very hard time believing that these documents were being given to the IRA. It sounds like a set-up."

James Gallagher of the Washington-based Irish American Unity Conference said one of the Sinn Féin men held on the charges was allegedly collecting information for a report on Northern Ireland's predominantly Protestant police service. King and the four other chairmen of the Adhoc Committee, including Congressman Benjamin Gilman, last week demanded new US initiatives to ensure police reforms as specified in the Patten Report, an integral part of the Good Friday accord.

"Our feeling is that this raid was a raid on democracy," Gallagher said this week. "This was an attack on a legitimate political party. One has to have some really incriminating evidence to do that, and that hasn't surfaced. The whole thing looks like a staged affair. It's very discouraging."

Gallagher called for an independent international body to investigate the Stormont raid and the accusations against Sinn Féin.

"This is a very serious matter, one that should be given over to the United Nations," he said. "We have absolutely no trust in Britain. We don't expect to get truthful answers from them."

Regardless of the status of the Stormont Assembly, Morrison said the Good Friday Agreement "must go forward."

"No one who's visited Northern Ireland in the last decade can deny that the agreement has bought a lot of benefits. Things are improving and anyone that's blind to that must have their eyes closed," he said. "Perhaps the unionist community has been sold on the idea that things wouldn't change.

They're not in charge any more and they never will be again. They're going to have to share power with Catholics."

C J Miller is a journalist who writes about Irish issues in Rockland County, NY. She is also currently writing a book on the lives of ex-Republican prisoners who served time in Long Kesh and the Crumlin Road Jail.

This article appeared in the October 16, 2002 edition of Our Town, a Rockland County newspaper.

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