Ball of Confusion

Sometimes it all seems to change so fast; this morning, it was a great day for Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein gave the clearest sign yet that the war was over, the Unionists welcomed this announcement, and then the IRA gave a statement backing up Gerry Adams and committing to the continuing decommission of its arms. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern announced that elections for the Stormont Parliament would be held in November. Things were looking up.

Four hours later, it all seems to have fallen apart again. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (the biggest Unionist party in NI), took issue with this afternoon's decommissioning announcement by General de Chastelain (to sum up: He can't say what they got rid of, but it was a lot of guns). As of tonight, it looks like it's all gone horribly wrong yet again.

I can see Trimble's position; I think he's ready to jump for a new Stormont assembly, and that he'd quite like to be the UUP leader that brought peace to the region. However, there's a sizable section of his party (and the electorate in the area too) that won't be satisfied until they see every last IRA gun destroyed with their own eyes (they're normally surprisingly quiet when it comes to the subject of Loyalist arms, but that's another debate). Trimble has to be careful, as his position as leader is shaky at best, and he doesn't want the party to be routed in the November elections by the hard-line DUP. The IRA, on the other hand, have hopefully realised that violence is not the answer, but I think that they want to keep the extent of their weapons cache under wraps (perhaps it was larger than British intelligence thought?), and while they're receptive to the peace process, they're not willing to bend over backwards to save Trimble. Hence the current deadlock.

On some days, all you want to do is round them up, lock them in a room, and not let them out until they've come up with a solution. Perhaps it's time to break out the IKEA Paas Table again

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