4 March 1999 Edition
Adams completes sucessful Australian visit
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams concluded a hectic nine day trip to Australia last Monday with a one hour meeting with Australian opposition Labour Leader Kim Beazley, and a fifteen minute phone conversation with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. He then met Archbishop Hickey of Perth.
Accompanied by Anne O'Sullivan, the new head of Sinn Fein's Australia desk, and Ard Comhairle member Dodie McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader overlapped ten to fifteen events each day, as well as press conferences and interviews. During the last public engagement of the tour, Anne O'Sullivan fell from the stage fracturing her foot.
Speaking at a final press conference, Gerry Adams said, ``it has been a very successful visit. We met thousands of Irish Australians and spoke to civic, business and political representation at state and federal government level.'' At the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Gerry Adams gave a keynote address to over one thousand students and guests, which was broadcast nationally on Australian television.
The Sinn Fein President set his visit to Australia in the context of Sinn Fein's peace strategy and Republican efforts to see the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Fein long ago recognised the importance of the international community in conflict resolution processes. This is especially important because Ireland is so much smaller than our off shore neighbour Britain and is consequently at a great disadvantage. The international dimension can make a difference. Just look at South Africa! And there was never more a time than now when that vast lobby is needed. We are swiftly advancing towards the first anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and the talk is of postponements, missed deadlines, parking the peace process.
The issue of decommissioning has been grasped by Unionists as a tactical device to slow down or on the part of some, to even collapse a peace process which they have never wanted and which they feel is a threat to their ascendancy. If it was not the issue of decommissioning, it would be something else, some other issue, perhaps policing. Political Unionism is by and large not fully committed to the changes which are essential. They oppose these changes because they want to hold on to power, or their perception of power. They want, not reconciliation with their adversaries, but their humiliation and defeat. They cannot stomach the idea of shared power and equality. Behind all the demands about decommissioning, this is their true motivation.
Sinn Fein is committed to taking the gun of Irish Politics. Not just for a generation, but forever. However, others must do likewise. Let me place the issue in its context to give you some idea of the complexity of the problem. In the North of Ireland, there are eight armed groups and a myriad of smaller groups. There are the IRA, the loyalist UVF and the loyalist UDA. These groups are on cessation. Then there are the legal weapons, over 130,000 of them, and almost all of them are in the hands of Unionists. There is the Ulster Resistance, a shadowy loyalist paramilitary group, which is armed with weapons it secured from the former apartheid regime in South Africa. Then there is the RUC, the paramilitary pro-unionist police force. As well as this, there is the Royal Irish Regiment, a locally recruited British Army Regiment that is almost entirely unionist. Then we have the British Army itself. Outside of these groups is a host of smaller loyalist and republican groups, some of which are not on cessation. In recent weeks there has been a series of loyalist bomb attacks on nationalist families and their property carried out by loyalist groups calling themselves the `Red Hand Defenders' or the `Orange Volunteers'.
It is worth pointing out that the hand grenades being used in the current attacks on these nationalist families were imported ten years ago by the main loyalist organisations from the middle east via the former apartheid regime in South Africa. The key players both at the Irish end and at the South African end of this gun running operation were British agents. British military intelligence allowed these weapons into Ireland, as other agents within the loyalist groups were targeting the republican activists for death. All of this is a matter of public record. The family of Human Rights lawyer Pat Finucane, killed in 1989 by a British agent, two weeks ago handed a new file on this to the Irish and British governments which contains damning new evidence.
Into this complex and difficult issue it is our task to keep the guns silenced.
The difficult task ahead is to create the conditions the conditions in which we can secure disarmament by all those involved in military actions. It has not been and will not be an easy problem to resolve. Just as difficult and more challenging is the need to decommission the mindsets which are the basis for war.
The challenge for political leaders is to demonstrate that politics do work and in that way remove forever a reason for anyone to take up arms in pursuit of political goals.
I believe that the issue of decommissioning must be defused as an obstacle or a precondition to progress.
Accompanied by Anne O'Sullivan, the new head of Sinn Fein's Australia desk, and Ard Comhairle member Dodie McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader overlapped ten to fifteen events each day, as well as press conferences and interviews. During the last public engagement of the tour, Anne O'Sullivan fell from the stage fracturing her foot.
Speaking at a final press conference, Gerry Adams said, ``it has been a very successful visit. We met thousands of Irish Australians and spoke to civic, business and political representation at state and federal government level.'' At the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Gerry Adams gave a keynote address to over one thousand students and guests, which was broadcast nationally on Australian television.
The Sinn Fein President set his visit to Australia in the context of Sinn Fein's peace strategy and Republican efforts to see the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Fein long ago recognised the importance of the international community in conflict resolution processes. This is especially important because Ireland is so much smaller than our off shore neighbour Britain and is consequently at a great disadvantage. The international dimension can make a difference. Just look at South Africa! And there was never more a time than now when that vast lobby is needed. We are swiftly advancing towards the first anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and the talk is of postponements, missed deadlines, parking the peace process.
The issue of decommissioning has been grasped by Unionists as a tactical device to slow down or on the part of some, to even collapse a peace process which they have never wanted and which they feel is a threat to their ascendancy. If it was not the issue of decommissioning, it would be something else, some other issue, perhaps policing. Political Unionism is by and large not fully committed to the changes which are essential. They oppose these changes because they want to hold on to power, or their perception of power. They want, not reconciliation with their adversaries, but their humiliation and defeat. They cannot stomach the idea of shared power and equality. Behind all the demands about decommissioning, this is their true motivation.
Sinn Fein is committed to taking the gun of Irish Politics. Not just for a generation, but forever. However, others must do likewise. Let me place the issue in its context to give you some idea of the complexity of the problem. In the North of Ireland, there are eight armed groups and a myriad of smaller groups. There are the IRA, the loyalist UVF and the loyalist UDA. These groups are on cessation. Then there are the legal weapons, over 130,000 of them, and almost all of them are in the hands of Unionists. There is the Ulster Resistance, a shadowy loyalist paramilitary group, which is armed with weapons it secured from the former apartheid regime in South Africa. Then there is the RUC, the paramilitary pro-unionist police force. As well as this, there is the Royal Irish Regiment, a locally recruited British Army Regiment that is almost entirely unionist. Then we have the British Army itself. Outside of these groups is a host of smaller loyalist and republican groups, some of which are not on cessation. In recent weeks there has been a series of loyalist bomb attacks on nationalist families and their property carried out by loyalist groups calling themselves the `Red Hand Defenders' or the `Orange Volunteers'.
It is worth pointing out that the hand grenades being used in the current attacks on these nationalist families were imported ten years ago by the main loyalist organisations from the middle east via the former apartheid regime in South Africa. The key players both at the Irish end and at the South African end of this gun running operation were British agents. British military intelligence allowed these weapons into Ireland, as other agents within the loyalist groups were targeting the republican activists for death. All of this is a matter of public record. The family of Human Rights lawyer Pat Finucane, killed in 1989 by a British agent, two weeks ago handed a new file on this to the Irish and British governments which contains damning new evidence.
Into this complex and difficult issue it is our task to keep the guns silenced.
The difficult task ahead is to create the conditions the conditions in which we can secure disarmament by all those involved in military actions. It has not been and will not be an easy problem to resolve. Just as difficult and more challenging is the need to decommission the mindsets which are the basis for war.
The challenge for political leaders is to demonstrate that politics do work and in that way remove forever a reason for anyone to take up arms in pursuit of political goals.
I believe that the issue of decommissioning must be defused as an obstacle or a precondition to progress.