Relief to Blair as IRA formally bids farewell to arms ..

By Rashmee Roshan Lall/TNN

London: In an historic statement, the Irish Republic Army (IRA) has ordered its “soldiers’’ to “stand downdump arms cease all activities’’ and end a campaign thought to have been western Europe’s bloodiest, longest-running conflict.

The extraordinary command by the IRA’s still-secret, shadowy ‘Army Council’ for “volunteers’’ henceforth to pursue their goals by “purely political and democratic means’’, has been welcomed across the political spectrum, in Britain and the US, from where the IRA traditionally received monetary and moral support at the hands of Irish Americans.

The IRA, which asked its units to disband at 1500 GMT (2030 IST) made the long-awaited statement announcing its change of heart and ending more than 30 years of violence, after a tense internal debate on why militancy and violence is no longer the way forward in the 21st century.

Commentators hailed the “beginning of the endgame’’ in Northern Ireland and the first real move to staunch the province’s gaping, running sores, after the announcement by an organisation once denounced as “terrorist’’ by Britain.

But critics said the IRA had partly gone down this path before—in 2003—and needed to make clear it was in favour of peace for all time rather than simply the temporary absence of war. The IRA announcement it would finally take the gun out of Irish politics is seen as a crucial move to revive talks on a lasting political settlement in Northern Ireland.

The IRA’s statement comes seven years after the historic Good Friday Agreement offered a power-sharing arrangement between Northern Ireland’s deeply-divided Protestants and Catholics. The IRA is held responsible for nearly 1,800 of 3,000 murders during decades of militancy, aimed at freeing Northern Ireland from British rule.

A person walks past Irish Republican graffiti on Thursday in West Belfast, Northern Ireland as the IRA said it formally ordered an end to its armed campaign against British rule

the end of an era

http://www.legalday.co.uk/current/terror-irish.htm

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