The Hindu : Irish polls put off amid `bugging' row

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 02, 2003

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International

Irish polls put off amid `bugging' row

By Hasan Suroor

The Sinn Fein leader, Martin McGuinness, speaks to the media in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Wednesday. — AP

LONDON MAY 1. In a fresh setback to the Northern Ireland peace process, the much-awaited elections to the provincial assembly, scheduled for May 29, were put off today even as the waters were further muddied after the British government was accused of bugging telephone conversations of senior figures in the Republican movement.

The postponement of elections was announced this afternoon as deadlock continued over efforts to get the IRA to declare an end to armed militancy — the condition set by the Unionists for joining a coalition government with the Republicans after the elections. Without an agreement on government-formation, elections would have been meaningless.

Northern Ireland has been without a government since last October when the provincial administration was suspended following allegations of IRA spying. The row over bugging followed publication of leaked transcripts in a book on Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein MP and his party's chief peace negotiator. In one transcript, Mr McGuinness is heard talking to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, and in another to the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Mow Mowlam, in July 1999. A third and more recent transcript relates to a private conversation between Mr. McGuiness and his party chief, Gerry Adams, in September 2001.

It is believed the conversations were taped as part of a surveillance operation against Mr. McGuinness who, still has 'links' with IRA's powerful "army council''.

While Mr. Blair refused to comment on the controversy saying, "I don't and will not comment on any matters related to security,'' he said he remained committed to the former Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson's `doctrine' that MPs' telephones would not be tapped.

Republicans, were furious and said it was `disgraceful' that a Government which preached virtues of reconciliation to others was itself not willing to give up old habits of confrontation.

``There are people within the British intelligence services, who in the course of some 25 years, have not been able to accept the implications of the peace process and the change that the peace process begins,'' Mr. McGuinness said amid speculation that the leak was intended to sabotage efforts to revive the peace process.

The row comes barely two weeks after an inquiry report revealed how security agencies colluded with Protestant loyalist paramilitaries to target Catholic republican activists in the eighties and the nineties.

Ironically, Unionists were also worked up saying that the `intimate' tone of the leaked conversations suggested that the people at the highest levels of the Government enjoyed a `cosy' relationship with Republican leadership.

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