BELFAST: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Northern Ireland on Monday to push forward with the final steps in its peace process, lending diplomatic muscle to a cause long supported by Washington and her own family.
Clinton, whose husband former President Bill Clinton helped to broker a deal that ended decades of violence here, said President Barack Obama’s administration would do all it could to support the process.
Securing political stability has become all the more important to lure more US investment to Northern Ireland during the financial crisis, she said.
“Our businesses have long been interested in investing but it was your commitment to peace that finally made it possible,” Clinton told the Northern Ireland Assembly.
“It is critical in this moment of economic turmoil to protect the progress you have already achieved and to build upon it.”
Clinton’s trip comes just one week after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown flew to Belfast to try to inject momentum into the peace process in the province whose economy relies heavily on central government spending from London.
While Northern Ireland had enjoyed relative peace since a 1998 deal ended the Irish Republican Army’s military campaign against British rule, tricky political problems remain and subsidies from Westminster will diminish as the UK tries to cut state borrowing.
Relations between the two governing parties in Belfast are brittle due to a disagreement on when power over policing and justice should be transferred to the administration from London.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, of the republican Sinn Fein party, wanted the authority in Belfast’s hands months ago but First Minister Peter Robinson of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party is holding out for a deal on funding.
Clinton met McGuinness and Robinson before her speech to the Stormont Assembly, a rare address by a foreign dignitary.
“I’m here today to send a strong message that the Obama administration and the United States are committed to supporting you as you continue your journey,” Clinton said.
Relations between McGuinness, a former IRA commander, and Robinson have deteriorated sharply, with Sinn Fein suspicious that Robinson is stalling to placate hard-liners within his party.
Some factions in the DUP still oppose sharing power with their former enemies.
Dissident republican groups have been tapping into a sense of disillusionment in some nationalist areas with the Real IRA killing two British soldiers in March and increasing attacks on police officers.
Last month, police made safe a bomb containing 600 lb (270 kg) of homemade explosives, bigger than the device which killed 29 people in Omagh in 1998, the deadliest incident of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles.”
Dissident republicans were suspected of building the bomb uncovered last month.
More than 3,600 people were killed in violence between the late 1960s and the 1998 Good Friday peace deal.
As former US First Lady, Hillary Clinton gave a lot of support to pro-peace women’s groups in Northern Ireland and visited patients injured in the Omagh bombing.
“For me this is very personal,” she told the assembly.
“My husband and I came here in 1995, Bill was deeply invested in forging the Good Friday Agreement.”
