Belfast, U.K.
Protestant voters in the British province of Northern Ireland have elected a hard-line party opposed to the Good Friday peace accord. The 1998 Good Friday agreement ended three decades of violence between Catholic separatists and Protestant nationalists in Northern Ireland by creating a Northern Ireland Assembly, a legislative body made up of Catholic and Protestant parties. But the two sides continued to bicker over the slow pace of Irish Republican Army disarmament, and in October 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to dissolve the assembly and reinstate direct rule from London. Now that the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party is the leading Protestant voice, prospects for a new power-sharing government seem dimmer than ever. Party leader Ian Paisley said he would never form a government with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. “I don’t accept the principle that we must sit down with armed terrorists,” Paisley said.
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