Adams expresses the Sinn Fein view of the position of Unionism. He calls for Blair to end what is sometimes described by Republicans and Nationalists as the Unionist veto:
“So the challenge for Mr. Blair is to shape his own system, his own agencies, to make this process work, and in so doing to accept that the leaderships of political unionism will not journey along the Good Friday Agreement process if they can avoid that. But like people everywhere they will respond to the conditions in which they live and I retain a confidence that if unionism is liberated, like the rest of us, from the conditions of the past they will rise to the challenge.”
And on Unionism itself:
“There can be no escape from the reality that the conditions in which we will all have to live are those contained in the Good Friday Agreement. Until the unionists know that for a certainty they will resist that Agreement. This is a hugely traumatic process for unionism. In their hearts they know that the game is up. It isn’t over. But it is up. And whether the majority of unionists ever had any real advantage from the old agenda depends on how you define the word advantage.”
Previously peaceful means.
A general account used for the daily threads and other things.
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