SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS has been made and it is now up to the Stormont parties to push for agreement, Taoiseach Brian Cowen and the British prime minister Gordon Brown insisted at their press conference.
Having outlined in their statement their intention to set a date for the devolution of justice powers and to enhance the method for dealing with contentious loyalist parades, both Mr Cowen and Mr Brown denied their efforts at Hillsborough had failed.
“I don’t think we’ve failed,” Mr Brown said. “I think we have made enormous progress from where we were on Monday, where, quite honestly, the parties were not talking to each other.
“It is now for the parties to look at these individual issues and see how they can progress them to a final document. If they can’t do that and it’s not possible, we will publish our own document.”
He added: “Let’s be straightforward about this: on almost all the issues there is near to agreement.”
Mr Cowen said the two sides could make a deal: “I believe that the people who we’ve been dealing with can collectively come to such an agreement, but they must do so in the immediate days ahead . . .”
The talks were about issues that had been unresolved by the parties at St Andrews, Mr Brown said.
“We’ve had devolution, but we’ve got incomplete devolution. The new chapter begins when devolution is complete, and once we can get agreement on that then I believe that the whole focus of the Assembly can move from the constitutional issues that it has had to examine to all the other issues.”
Mr Brown denied the talks had failed: “No, we’ve made good progress because we’ve dealt with each of the individual issues. I said to you earlier, we can see a way that we can make progress together, an early date for devolution, an early date, I stress, not a date long in advance of where we are now. We’ve seen how we can make progress on the issue still outstanding about the justice ministry, we know that with a little work and some goodwill, but I want the parties to bring that forward because they’ve got to implement it.”
He added: “The one thing that I’m clear is that Northern Ireland will see reasonable proposals that have been put forward, that are a pathway to solving these problems, because that is what we’ve been working on in the last few days.”
The Taoiseach said a lot of “positive” and “constructive” work had been done. “ . . . It hasn’t been completed in the timescale that was available to the prime minister and I [but] it is going to continue. We have able people who will preside over that and work with the politicians here, and let’s concentrate on the progress that’s made and look and focus on completion of that work.”
Mr Brown said: “Our mission is really today to say, ‘Look, here are our proposals that we’ve put to the parties that are the basis of an agreement.’ These are reasonable, they are the pathway to a deal, we urge the parties now to work through these proposals in the next few hours, to work hard at getting that agreement and I believe that agreement can be achieved.”
Mr Cowen said: “Let us please focus for the next couple of days and give this process our best wishes so that we can obtain an outcome that we all recognise the people desire. And if there are issues which we would like to have resolved by now, we believe they are resolvable, we require the parties to work for agreement, and as I’ve said, the two governments will assess the situation on Friday as a result of what we hope will be a successful conclusion in the next phase of these talks.”