Sunday to be a day of peace rallies

RALLIES for peace continued in the North yesterday as final preparations got under way for international demonstrations on Sunday.

Rallies take place at 3 p.m. on Sunday in a number of major towns north and south of the Border. Rallies will also take place in London, Warrington and New York at the same time, with simultaneous ringing of church bells. In the North, the rallies will take place in Belfast, Derry, Omagh, Lurgan, Newcastle, Ballymena and Enniskillen.

Yesterday in the seaside resort of Bangor, Co Down, several hundred people turned out at lunch time for a rally organised by the Kilcooley women's group. A banner with the headline "Give Peace a Chance" was held up at the ceremony during which a minute's silence was observed for those who died in the Canary Wharf bomb. Then church representatives and councillors made appeals for peace.

The Omagh district trade unions in Co Tyrone also organised a rally at the town's courthouse steps at lunchtime. At the rally there were calls for an end to the bombs and killings, and for no return to sectarian violence

Among those at the demonstration were Sinn Fein councillors, who said afterwards that they were "disappointed and angry" that the rally organisers did not "call for all party peace talks as the only route forward".

The party's west Tyrone chairman, Cllr Barry McElduff, said Sinn Fein welcomed people's genuine interest and desire for real peace "but there must be no going back to the old failed agenda of the past scape goating republicans and letting John Major, who effectively killed our hopes, off the hook. We need honesty, not the easy way out."

Meanwhile, a Dublin based group calling itself the Committee for Public Action is organising a rally at the GPO in Dublin for tomorrow at 6.30 p.m. With the slogan "Start Talking Now", the committee said "The last 17 months have shown that there may be a way beyond the stalemate which has kept this country frozen for 25 years. The diplomacy and manoeuvring engaged in by politicians who claim to be democratically mandated by us have squandered this chance."