N Irish Unionists want parliament suspended

DUBLIN: Northern Ireland’s first minister will ask Britain’s Prime Minister to suspend the Northern Irish Assembly for four weeks to facilitate talks to save the power-sharing executive threatened by a crisis over an IRA-linked murder.
Peter Robinson’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) sought the permission of a parliamentary committee to extend the summer recess by a month earlier on Tuesday but their motion was voted down by the nationalist Sinn Fein, whom they share power with.
The DUP last week said it wanted Sinn Fein, the one-time political wing of the IRA, thrown out of government after police said a rump of the militant group that formally disbanded in 2005 may have been involved the recent killing of a former member.
“If the prime minister refuses to suspend the Assembly we will take unilateral action,” Robinson told The Irish Times newspaper ahead of talks with Cameron in London.
“We are not going to indicate what unilateral action would mean until we have exhausted the other options.” Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny indicated that Robinson would be granted his request and that talks would begin.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, whose party are bidding to upset Kenny’s re-election hopes in the Irish republic next year, accused the Irish Prime Minister of making an “offensive and vindictive intervention.”
An end to violence by Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrillas was a central plank of the 1998 Good Friday accord.
The deal largely ended three decades of conflict between mostly Catholic nationalists, who favoured unification with the Republic of Ireland, and Protestants wanting to stay in the United Kingdom.
Senior members of Sinn Fein, including politicians who were once members of the IRA, have denied the group still exists. Police say the IRA is still active in some form, though no longer engaged in terrorism.