Word: paisley
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...months ago the Reverend Ian Paisley, the thunderous, 81-year-old Protestant preacher who leads the unionists, said the IRA's political allies, Sinn Fein, would enter government "over our dead bodies." Paisley is now the First Minister of Northern Ireland, heading the new administration alongside former IRA leader Martin McGuinness. These days he reckons the region is "starting upon the road - I emphasize starting - which I believe will take us to lasting peace...
...both sides. The peace process had initially been built around moderate parties - David Trimble's Democratic Unionists and the Social Democratic Labor Party of John Hume - but voters from each community gradually opted to be represented at the negotiating table by tougher parties. A majority of Protestant voters thought Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, which had rejected the earlier process, offered the best to chance to stop Sinn Fein from dominating; many Catholics felt safest being represented by Sinn Fein, the IRA's political allies...
...Once the two ?extremes? dominated the mainstream, the only way to an agreement was to get them to strike the deal. Now that they have, the very fact that Paisley and McGuinness have been so tough with each other in the past means that that only marginal elements reject the new deal...
...lesson would be the subtle use of carrots and sticks: Blair was frequently berated by Unionists - usually Paisley - for granting concessions to the IRA. But he usually did so only in exchange for an irreversible step by the militants: First they gave up their campaign of violence; then they destroyed their weapons. This year, as one of the final pieces of the jigsaw, Irish nationalists gave up their longstanding taboo against cooperating with the Northern Ireland police...
...Another lesson is flexibility: When Unionists dumped Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble as their leader, Blair adapted the process to bring in Paisley. He also employed "creative ambiguity" to get over the toughest hurdles by letting each side believe they were scoring points. Even today the central question of whether Northern Ireland will ultimately be British or Irish remains unresolved, but the matter will be settled in politics...