Fears unfounded as SF is `wedded to peace process', O Caolain says

Sinn FEin is "wedded to the peace process" and will not back away from the "huge investment" the leadership has made in bringing the republican movement onside, Mr Caoimhghin O Caolain TD said yesterday.

Speaking at the Parnell Summer School in Co Wicklow, he said unionist fears that the republican movement was speaking peace while preparing for war were unfounded.

Addressing the theme "Economy and Society, North and South: the Future", he agreed with an Ulster Unionist MLA, Dr Esmond Birnie, that both sides in the peace process had had to expend great effort in bringing their own membership with them. "That is something I know a lot about. Sinn Fein is talking peace, not pretend politics," he said.

Mr O Caolain said there was widespread acceptance of the logic of an all-island economy, and the Good Friday agreement offered the possibility of tangible economic benefits to the whole island.

However, Dr Birnie, while he accepted that there could be pragmatic benefits to Northern Ireland in co-operation in economic spheres as well as other areas, warned that the benefits must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and not pursued as a political goal in itself.

He was also unconvinced that economic co-operation with the South was better in all cases than co-operation "with the much larger market in the rest of the United Kingdom".

The director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, Mr Andy Pollak, said in a "cold analysis" of the internal situation in Northern Ireland he could not see a united Ireland in the next 20 to 30 years.

He said he felt the communities would have to build trust and enjoy a long period of normalisation before any side would be prepared to make the compromises necessary to bring about further constitutional change.

While demographic trends would soon give the nationalists a majority in the North, he warned of the implications of trying to assimilate an "angry and mistrustful" unionist population against their will.

Also at yesterday's summer school session, the Irish Times journalist Padraig Yeates addressed the theme of "1913 and the Legacy of the Lockout".

While the lockout had been a "heroic failure", it had led to the utopian visions "unveiled by the strike leaders at those wonderful meetings outside Liberty Hall in the late summer of 1913".

While the strike was a failure in that the workers returned to work, those who kept faith with the utopian visions or dreams were seduced by "social republicanism", and various trade union leaders over the next few years flirted with radical nationalism and the influence of James Connolly.

Mr Yeates said these men would have been amazed at today's trade unions sitting at the table with government drawing up plans for social and economic development "in any other context than a socialist revolution".