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Update 5: September 2005: Northern Ireland after the 2005 General Election

In chapter 11, in the account of devolved government in Northern Ireland, we saw that the high hopes for the return of 'normal' politics to the province after the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement had over time been deflated. By the 2005 General Election not only had direct rule from Westminster been reinstated, but the whole peace process had been immobilised. But the outcome of the 2005 General Election may have cranked the process into movement once more. 

At first sight this seems an odd judgement. The result was a catastrophe for the two parties that were central to creating and supporting the Agreement, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). The UUP lost five seats, and was reduced to a single member in the Westminster Parliament. Its leader, David Trimble, who had been the original First Minister in the devolved executive created after 1998, resigned as party leader (he also lost his Westminster seat). Though the SDLP maintained its total representation (losing one and gaining one seat) its share of the vote fell by 3.5 per cent. 

The two big gainers were the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin, which emerged as the leading parties on the Unionist and Nationalist sides respectively. That result served to confirm, but even more emphatically, the outcome of the 2003 Assembly elections, discussed in chapter 11. 

In the wake of the Election the outcome for the peace process looked particularly bleak. The DUP had declined to support the original agreement and continues to use language implacably hostile to Nationalism, and to Sinn Féin in particular. Sinn Féin, though a supporter of the Agreement and a participant in Ministerial office under the short-lived Executive, has been a highly critical participant, and has been dogged by continuing accusations that it is simply the political arm of terrorist Republicanism. In addition, the summer of 2005 'on the ground' in Northern Ireland was one of the most disturbed in recent years: there were street battles between factions in the Unionist and Nationalist communities, and between the police and factions of both communities. The extent to which the paramilitary groups on both sides are involved in gangsterism, drug running and coercion in their own communities has been highlighted by violent feuds between different paramilitary 'Loyalist' (Unionist) gangs. On the Nationalist side it was dramatised by two events that closely followed each other. In December 2004 a £26 million bank robbery was credibly attributed by the police to the IRA, or at least to a faction within it; bank robberies have been a traditional method of Republican fund raising. In January 2005 there occurred the brutal murder of a Belfast Catholic, Robert McCartney. This last led to accusations from all communities of gangsterism, intimidation, and cover-ups on the part of the IRA and Sinn Féin.

However, the very fact of Sinn Féin and Democratic Unionist domination of politics in the province itself intensified the pressure on both to break the deadlock. In July 2005 the Provisional IRA made a historic announcement: that it was ceasing its 35 year long armed campaign in favour of peaceful political methods, and that it would put all its weapons stocks out of commission. In a well-choreographed manoeuvre the British Government almost immediately began to dismantle some of its surveillance towers on the border with the Republic. At the start of September General John de Chastelaine, the head of the decommissioning agency appointed to oversee and verify disarmament, announced that he expected the process to be complete in a few days. The Democratic Unionists have thus far responded with scepticism to the announcement demanding, for example, photographic evidence of the process - something presently resisted by the IRA. Nevertheless, successful decommissioning by the IRA would remove the most important public objection expressed by the DUP to the resumption of devolved government in the province. 

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