Accord offers hope for `new politics' - DL

The Belfast Agreement offered the potential for a "new politics" North and South, banishing the notion of Northern Ireland as "unfinished business", the leader of Democratic Left told a party seminar at the weekend.

Mr Proinsias De Rossa said the republican movement had traditionally accepted the dictum that "Labour can wait", an idea he and others in the movement began to challenge in the 1960s. But the changes now proposed in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution would clear the ground not just for the implementation of the agreement, but - by settling the "national question" once and for all - also usher in an era in which long-postponed socialist ideals could be pursued.

Mr De Rossa said he had felt "a sense of release in the past two weeks, greater than anything since the man in the Curragh internment camp said to me: There's the gate". The Irish people were being released from the weight of history and the necessity of living by rules laid down by "dead heroes" of the past.

But he warned against complacency in the campaign for a Yes vote. The Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster, Dr Henry Patterson, told the seminar that while the agreement was very similar to Sunningdale, the big change this time was the willingness of the Irish Government to amend Articles 2 and 3.

The unionist leader in the Sunningdale negotiations, Mr Brian Faulkner, had sought a similar concession but the Cosgrave coalition feared the effect of a Fianna Failled onslaught on such amendments.

"The strength of Mr David Trimble's position is that the North-South dimension is much less threatening than Sunning dale's Council of Ireland or, indeed, than that envisaged by the Framework Document," he said.

This was partly due to Mr Trimble's good relationship with the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, which contrasted sharply with relations between Mr Faulkner and the then prime minister, Mr Edward Heath. "Heath was very impatient with Faulkner's objections to a Council of Ireland, and didn't seem to understand his difficulties with it."