Dublin
The refusal of the Irish Republican Army to hand over its stockpile of weapons is holding up a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said this week. “Democratic politics and continued paramilitarism simply do not mix,” Ahern said. A new British-Irish peace plan will only be unveiled, he said, after the IRA definitively renounces violence and hands over its remaining weapons. But at rallies across Ireland to mark the Easter rebellion of 1916, when Irish rebels rose up against their British rulers, IRA spokesmen were unconciliatory. “This is a period for republicans to remain resolute,” an official IRA statement said. The IRA has thousands of guns and explosives, mostly acquired from Libya in the 1980s and believed to be hidden across Ireland and Northern Ireland.
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