Unite Against Violence! What is this World coming to? This is the BEST news to come out of Northern Ireland in 80 years.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090310/ap_on_re_eu/eu_northern_ireland
IRA dissident killings unites Northern Ireland

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – The Protestant and Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland mounted an exceptional display of unity against rising violence from Irish Republican Army dissidents — and vowed Tuesday to defeat hard-liners with the power of popular will.

Former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, who long hoped that slaying police officers would help him achieve his dream of a united Ireland, stood shoulder to shoulder with his Protestant partner atop the government, Peter Robinson, and Northern Ireland police commander Hugh Orde.

The scene itself was an unprecedented surprise. More stunning were the clear-cut words from McGuinness, whose Sinn Fein party has faced years of outside pressure to embrace British law and order. He pledged his personal support to the English police chief, and demanded that his own police-loathing supporters abandon their traditional code of silence and expose the IRA dissidents in their Irish Catholic communities.

"I have to keep my nerve, and to appeal to my community to assist the police services north and south to defeat these people," McGuinness said of the dissidents who killed two British soldiers and a policeman over the past three days — the first such killings in more than a decade.

"There is a duty on me, a responsibility on me to lead from the front, and I expect that people will follow," McGuinness said. He called the IRA splinter groups "traitors to the island of Ireland. They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island, and they don't deserve to be supported by anyone."

Analysts said the dissidents' dramatic escalation of bloodshed since Saturday was designed to divide and undermine McGuinness and Robinson as they embarked on their most significant foreign mission: a planned 10-day tour of the United States culminating at the White House on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, to meet U.S. President Barack Obama.

Twice, deadly shootings have obliged the power-sharing chiefs to postpone their departure. They will try again Wednesday, and still expect to meet Obama next week on Ireland's national holiday, the day when Northern Ireland leaders traditionally curry U.S. economic and political support.

But political analysts widely suggested Tuesday that the dissidents, though likely trying to exacerbate tensions between Robinson's Democratic Unionists and McGuinness' Sinn Fein, were having the opposite effect.

After their first-ever joint appearance with the police chief, McGuinness and Robinson — who have kept their distance during eight frosty months sharing power — traveled in the same car together to visit the widow of the most recent victim, 48-year-old Constable Stephen Carroll. The 23-year police veteran was shot in the back of his head Monday night when a gunman from the Continuity IRA dissident group fired on his parked police car.


What's next? Peace between Israel and Palestine? If the Irish Catholics and Protestants can do it, why not the Levantine Muslims and Jews?

David F Mayer