The British Prime Minister gives voice. Rishi Sunak reiterated this Wednesday April 19 his call for the restarting of the Northern Irish institutions, increasing the pressure on the unionists who have been boycotting them for a year, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of peace in the British province.
“I call on you to work to put Stormont (the seat of local institutions, Editor’s note) in working order,” he said in Belfast at a conference for the anniversary of the peace agreement. “I am convinced that this is the right thing to do for the union of the four nations of the United Kingdom,” he insisted. “We believe passionately that Northern Ireland is stronger within the UK and the UK is stronger with Northern Ireland,” he insisted, addressing Unionists in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
Seeing in the post-Brexit provisions a threat to the place of the British province within the United Kingdom, the DUP has so far not been convinced by the progress made by London with Brussels after months of negotiations.
The DUP has been boycotting local institutions in Northern Ireland for more than a year to protest the consequences of Brexit in the province, preventing the formation of a government with shared powers between Republicans and Unionists, as provided for in the agreement of Good Friday.
At a conference at Queen’s University Belfast to mark 25 years of the deal, calls grew to convince the DUP to end the political deadlock, from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to the Prime Irish Minister Leo Varadkar, passing by former US President Bill Clinton.
Calling the new Ireland deal, dubbed the ‘Windsor framework’, a ‘new start for old friends’, the EU chief executive said that ‘history calls today’s leaders’ to follow the path of their predecessors to “shape the future of Northern Ireland”.
Bill Clinton, for his part, expressed his hope that the agreement concluded between the United Kingdom and the European Union could still be subject to small modifications, and then underlined that the peace agreement concluded a Quarter Century was never intended to be used as a tool of “obstruction”.
“It is now up to Northern Irish politicians to take the initiative”, “to take control of their history”, “of their destiny”, launched Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. Negotiated with active American participation, the peace agreement signed on April 10, 1998 ended three decades of deadly clashes between Unionists, mainly Protestants, and Republicans, mainly Catholics, with the involvement of the British army (3 500 dead).
Current US President Joe Biden, who was in Belfast last Wednesday for the anniversary of the agreement, also called on local political forces to overcome their divisions. But the Unionists rejected him, accusing him of partiality, even of being anti-British.
