GERRY Adams MP is off to America, no doubt to prepare Irish American opinion for whatever the IRA is about to do – probably further acts of decommissioning and finally going away, you know. He will perhaps have a more difficult job without the help of Joe Cahill this time. Meanwhile, Jim Allister MEP has set out the DUP’s bottom line.
PA quotes Allister as saying: “The essentials for stable institutions are the following: “Executive office only for those demonstrably and irreversibly detached from armed paramilitary organisations and criminal activity.
“An effective mechanism to exclude any who subsequently breach the practice of exclusively peaceful and democratic means.
“The Assembly as the elected forum must have the capacity to call executive members to account, both in the exercise of executive functions and cross-border responsibilities.
“There can be no wild cat ministerial action which defies the wish of the elected Assembly.”
Read past the bluster and rhetoric, and you’ll see some room for manoeuvre there. However, the new 20-day deadline for reaching agreement was a bit of a laugh. So what if the Queen’s speech is at the end of this month – if her Loyal Subjects in the DUP wish to delay things until next May, she will just have to bloody wait, eh?
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