BELFAST: Northern Ireland’s quibbling political parties gathered in Belfast on Wednesday for one last shot at forming a power-sharing government after a year of fruitless wrangling.
Britain’s new Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley, in post since Jan 8, has given the five main parties a brief window to get a devolved administration up and running.
Previous rounds of exhaustive talks have floundered, with several deadlines having come and gone.
Bradley said that the parties had “one last opportunity” to reach an agreement with a “short, intense” burst of talks.
In the absence of an executive, the British province has been run by civil servants over the past 12 months.
Failure to make “rapid progress” will mean the British government will set a budget for the new financial year, while fresh elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly — last held in May 2016 and March 2017 — would also be considered.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney is facilitating the talks alongside Bradley.
The two largest parties, the pro-British Democratic Unionists (DUP) and Irish republicans Sinn Fein, are at loggerheads over some final sticking points.
As the largest parties from each side of Northern Ireland’s cultural divide, the Protestant, conservative DUP and Catholic leftists Sinn Fein are supposed to govern together under a power-sharing accord reached in 1998 to end three decades of violent conflict.
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