Belfast pact will boost Donegal, unionist says

Cross-border co-operation under the Belfast Agreement will have a dramatic impact on Co Donegal, a leading Ulster Unionist has told the Patrick MacGill Summer School.

Mr Steven King, special adviser to the UUP deputy leader, Mr John Taylor, said Donegal in particular had been ill-served by partition, which cut it off from the main commercial centre of west Ulster, Derry.

"Its population has declined dramatically, partly for that reason, partly because of peripherality, and partly because it bore the brunt of failed economic policies devised in Dublin," he told the school in Glenties last night, during a debate entitled "A New Start for Northern Ireland".

The areas earmarked for cross-Border co-operation would change all this, however, "not least with regard to the fishing industry but also the accident and emergency services, whereby people will be able to avail of the services of Altnagelvin [Derry] and the Royal Victoria Hospital [Belfast] rather than have to travel to Dublin for a serious operation".

Transport would be increasingly considered in a cross-Border context, he added, and he particularly welcomed a plan for a ferry between Magilligan in Derry and Greencastle in Donegal.

He admitted that co-operation had been limited in the past by the weakness of local government in Northern Ireland, with a single county council in Donegal facing "many small and relatively ineffective authorities across the Border". Twenty-six local authorities were "far too many for Northern Ireland, especially in the context of a new Assembly", he added.

But if the Assembly was to work, he concluded, both unionists and nationalists had to be more realistic than they traditonally had been. "Appealing to romantic visions of Ireland will not do," he said. "Equally, unionists have a duty not to pretend that Northern Ireland was an imperial idyll until someone invented the IRA."

But a Democratic Unionist Party Assembly member, Mr Jim Wells, said this phase of the peace process was another phase in the "Sinn Fein/IRA strategy of the Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other . . . Once the present process of using the ballot box is exhausted, then they will return to what they do best and resume their terror campaign. That is why they will not give up their arsenal of weapons."

But he added that the DUP was committed "to holding Tony Blair and David Trimble to their pre-referendum promise that there would be no question of Sinn Fein/IRA in the government of Northern Ireland without the decommissioning of weapons".

The debate was also addressed by the SDLP's Mr Alex Atwood, the PUP's Mr Robin Stewart, and the editor of the Belfast Newsletter, Mr Geoff Martin. According to a supplied script, Mr Martin told the gathering that politicians in Northern Ireland did not yet know how to build their future themselves, because they had had to be "lectured, bullied and coerced" to move them as far as they had gone.

"We have a peace process, we have commissions foisted upon us to adjudicate every issue we cannot sort out among ourselves, and we have a new administration, artificially constructed for us in a way that would insult our intelligence if we had achieved for ourselves the level of political maturity necessary to enable an egalitarian society to evolve and thrive."

Few of the political leaders had voluntarily reached out to the people on the other side of the divide, he added "a process that is absolutely necessary if we are to heal divisions and build a new Northern Ireland".