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Blair to Hold Northern Irish Peace Talks
British Prime Minister Tony Blair will hold separate talks in London on Tuesday with rival Northern Irish political leaders in a bid to end a logjam that threatens the key 1998 peace accord, officials said on Monday.
Northern Ireland's fragile peace process has become bogged down as pro-Irish Roman Catholic and pro-British Protestant parties wrangle over the best way to police the troubled province and how to take the gun out of politics.
Tuesday's talks are the latest leg of tortuous efforts to stabilise the parties' shaky home-rule coalition government by getting agreement on guerrilla disarmament, military cuts and policing reforms.
Blair will have separate talks with First Minister David Trimble, a Protestant leader, and Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, the political ally of the guerrilla Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Seamus Mallon, a powerful Catholic moderate who is deputy first minister and deputy head of the SDLP nationalist party, will also be in London and is expected to have a face-to-face session with Blair, political sources said.
"Sinn Fein has been involved in intense discussions with the British government for over a week now," a Sinn Fein spokesman said.
"Gerry Adams will meet the British Prime Minister tomorrow in London to continue these discussions to see what progress, if any, has been made by the British government in addressing the concerns that Sinn Fein has expressed."
"Mr Trimble will be meeting Mr Blair in the early afternoon," said a spokesman for the First Minister's Ulster Unionist Party.
CEASEFIRE HOLDS
Guerrilla groups are on cease-fire after 30 years of strife but the Good Friday Agreement has been endangered by political wrangling and a spate of attacks by militant splinter groups
Blair traveled to the province last week for 11 hours of talks spanning two days with the feuding parties -- an initiative that involved the Irish and U.S. Governments in the last days of former President Bill Clinton's term of office.
The talks did not produce a breakthrough but Blair said before heading back to London that some progress had been made.
Although a final deal is not yet in sight, Tuesday's discussions were being seen as an important stage of a push to get an agreed formula and defuse growing strains on the accord before the onset of elections that are expected by May.
Earlier Monday the governments decided to postpone a meeting of one of the key structures which was spawned by the accord -- the British-Irish Council. It had been scheduled to convene in Dublin on Tuesday but has been deferred until February 5.
The meeting was postponed because British and Irish officials wanted to focus their energies on breaking the deadlock in the Northern Ireland peace process, government sources said.
Sinn Fein said Trimble was refusing to sign papers allowing Northern Ireland Health Minister Bairbre de Brun, a key Sinn Fein official, to attend the British-Irish Council meeting.
A spokesman for Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party, which has demanded that the IRA hands over arms, said Sinn Fein's allegations were "without basis."
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