Without pomp or ceremony, the Northern Ireland Executive will be restored at Stormont this afternoon. The First Minister, Mr Trimble, the deputy First Minister, Mr Mallon, together with Ministers representative of all traditions, will return to their old portfolios and resume their responsibilities around the one, all-inclusive, cabinet table. The Democratic Unionist Party, as usual, will engage in a bit of playacting. Their two Ministers, Mr Peter Robinson and Mr Nigel Dodds, will accept their portfolios but there will be two empty chairs. There will be little imprint of the hand of history.
The lack of any sense of occasion, however, should not detract from the signal importance of the re-establishment of a cross-community government in Northern Ireland. It met in what could be called embryonic form for ten short weeks from December to the day of its suspension last February. When it is restored today, the executive will be based on firmer principles of democracy. Mr Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party is sharing seats in government with Sinn Fein on the basis of a written commitment from the IRA to put its arms completely and verifiably beyond use.
The circumstances in which the Executive will be restored today, followed by the Northern Ireland Assembly next Monday, and the North/South implementation bodies on June 16th, mark an important milestone in the implementation of the Belfast Agreement. The guns-for-government argument has been addressed on paper satisfactorily. The peace process has been given a parliamentary base. The resumption of normal politics offers the only opportunity to tackle the fundamental problems in a divided society.
In saluting the return to devolved government, however, it is necessary to recognise the hard realities on the road immediately ahead. The DUP, for its own internal reasons perhaps, has decided to play musical chairs in pursuit of its policy to "bring down the Belfast Agreement and the republican agenda". Mr Robinson and Mr Dodds are Ministers, respectively, for Regional Development and Social Development.
They will serve for a short time before being replaced by other nominees of the party. While these tactics are strange, at least it can be said that the DUP are participating in the Executive to the same extent that they did before.
A bigger problem is the extent to which the Patten Report on police reforms will be implemented in the Bill to be debated in the House of Commons next week. This newspaper has consistently taken the view that the principles of the Patten Report must be adhered to by all sides, including the changing of the name of the RUC to the Northern Ireland Police Service. Any recognition that the new police service incorporates the RUC could only be acceptable to nationalists if it is down in the title deeds of the Bill as a matter of historical record. The Derry/Londonderry type of option must be resisted firmly.
The Belfast Agreement will proceed to implementation today with the restoration of the power-sharing Executive. It will only get a real chance to bed down, however, when the IRA begins the process of having its arms dumps inspected by the independent assessors, Mr Ramaphosa and Mr Ahtissaari. It is now incumbent on the two Governments and all of the pro-agreement parties to demand that the first inspections take place within a matter of weeks. There must be no doubts, in any quarter, that the IRA and Sinn Fein, as they sought for so long, can be allowed to have it both ways.