HILLSBOROUGH, Northern Ireland — A deal Friday to save Northern Ireland’s Catholic-Protestant government has given a new lease of life to an awkward partnership of former foes that still must overcome many obstacles to survive.
The prime ministers of Britain and Ireland stood beside Irish Catholic leader Martin McGuinness and British Protestant leader Peter Robinson as they heralded a deal that was 2 1/2 years of argument — and 10 days and nights of exhausting negotiations — in the making.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told both men they had completed an unlikely journey from warlords to practical politicians, and in the process helped consign to history a four-decade conflict that left 3,700 dead.
“We are in a new, more mature age of politics in Northern Ireland. People have looked over the abyss and said there must be no return to the past,” Brown said at a news conference alongside Robinson, a one-time Protestant militant, and McGuinness, former commander of the outlawed Irish Republican Army.
McGuinness’ Sinn Fein party had threatened to withdraw from power-sharing — shattering the central institution of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord — unless Robinson’s Democratic Unionists stopped blocking plans to create a Justice Department in Belfast that would oversee law and order in this long-divided society.
The deal Friday commits the Northern Ireland Assembly to elect a justice minister on March 9 and Britain to transfer control of more than 20 criminal justice and law enforcement agencies to Belfast on April 12.
The governments of Britain, Ireland and the U.S. long have pressed for this to happen as the last logical step in building a unity government that both majority Protestants and minority Catholics can support. Protestants opposed the move, in part, because they loathe the notion of former IRA figures having any role in overseeing justice.
