Progress in North remains real option, says De Rossa

PROGRESS remains a real option in Northern Ireland, the Minister for Social Welfare, Mr De Rossa, has predicted, based on what he termed a sober assessment of where they now stood.

He told the British Irish Association in Oxford last night that there was no point in pretending that, as far as Northern Ireland was concerned, it was anything other than a tense and dangerous summer.

The consequences of Drumcree had manifested themselves in a range of malign and divisive ways, including widespread arson and the boycott of some business premises.

Moreover, the obscenity of punishment attacks continued undiminished. Taken together with the continuing failure of the IRA to restore its ceasefire, and the tensions within loyalist organisations, it was not surprising that pessimism about the future was so widespread.

Faced with these difficulties, and the disappointingly slow rate of progress in the Mitchell talks to date, unbridled optimism would hardly be credible, Mr De Rossa continued.

"But I am going to argue that a sober assessment of where we now stand will make clear that progress remains a real option. Prophecies of doom can be self fulfilling."

He argued that if the events of the summer showed the difficulties in the way of political progress, they also, by default, showed the absolute need to reassert the primacy of the political process through substantive dialogue and negotiations.

Referring to the feeling of near despair that nothing had been learned and nothing forgotten post Drumcree, Mr De Rossa stated that the question should now be if, having got a glimpse of the worst, they were once again prepared to work for the best.

In the weeks since Drumcree, there had been no shortage of voices telling them that this search for a settlement was a doomed endeavour. Various alternatives had been floated.

There was brief mention of cantonisation, he said, a solution which would, in effect, institutionalise sectarianism and simply recreate in smaller areas the same conflicts unless, of course, ethnic cleansing also took place on a grand scale.

Mr De Rossa was also critical of proposals that local councils in Northern Ireland should be given additional powers to build trust from the bottom up in a step by step way.

The Minister concluded that all democrats must be deeply concerned at the widespread scepticism now manifest about the capacity of dialogue and of democratic politics to work in Northern Ireland.