Downing Street Says » Northern Ireland

» Tuesday, September 7, 2004

Northern Ireland

Asked about the possibility of trying another route should the talks on Northern Ireland at Leeds Castle next week fail, the PMOS said that as the Prime Minister had told journalists this morning, he did not think it would be helpful to start talking about Plan B when we were still trying to get Plan A to work. As he had made clear, we needed to be able to judge whether progress was going to be made or not. That meant asking whether we were going to see an end to paramilitarism, whether we were going to see decommissioning – and if so, whether the Unionists would agree to share power with the elected representatives of Nationalism and Republicanism. As he had underlined at Lancaster House in July, at some point we would need to come to a decision as to whether to keep travelling down the road we were currently going down, or whether we needed to do something different to take the process forward. Asked if the Prime Minister was considering the possibility of abandoning the Northern Ireland Assembly if the talks at Leeds Castle were not successful, the PMOS said that he did not think it would be helpful to get drawn into a discussion about specifics. No one should underestimate the importance of the talks next week. We believed that the parameters existed for a deal to be done. The key question was whether the will was there. If, at the end of the process, we concluded the answer was no, then obviously we would have to reflect on how to take the process forward. The Prime Minister was absolutely determined that the momentum we had seen until now should continue in some form because it had already had a positive impact in terms of bringing the conflict to an end in Northern Ireland. That being said, the talks at Leeds Castle had yet to take place. We hoped that a deal could be done there because we believed that such a thing was possible.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.