Clinton in Belfast seeks power-sharing progress

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the rival leaders of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government Monday to keep making their awkward coalition work for the sake of lasting peace.

In an address to the Northern Ireland Assembly, with Irish Catholics to her left and British Protestants to her right, Clinton said they should take the next critical step in cooperation — running the police and justice system together — as the best way to defeat Irish Republican Army dissidents still plotting bloodshed. Protestant leaders are blocking the move.

Clinton told a hushed, packed chamber in Stormont Parliamentary Building that IRA dissidents were "looking to seize any opportunity to undermine the process and destabilize this government. Now they are watching this assembly for signs of uncertainty or internal disagreement."

"They want to derail your confidence. And though they are small in number, their thuggish tactics and destructive ambitions threaten the security of every family in Northern Ireland," she said. "Moving ahead together with the process will leave them stranded on the wrong side of history."

Almost all of the 108 members of the assembly applauded Clinton's address. But a few backbenchers from the major Protestant-backed party, the Democratic Unionists, folded their arms instead and two senior figures, William McCrea and Gregory Campbell, left the chamber during the ovation.

That reflected Protestant irritation at being told what to do by outsiders, a point that Democratic Unionist officials said they had made earlier in private to Clinton.

First Minister Peter Robinson, who leads both the power-sharing administration and the Democratic Unionist Party, quipped afterward that Clinton should be pleased that everyone at least kept their seat while she was speaking.

"I thought it was a good speech," said Robinson, who did applaud. "Make any speech in the Northern Ireland Assembly and nobody walks out — it's a bit of triumph."

Clinton conceded this sensitivity in an unscripted addition to her address. "We know what it means to be supportive. And we also know what it means to meddle," she said, emphasizing that the U.S. sought to do the former, not the latter.

But Clinton also told both sides' politicians, in another unscripted addition, that they bore a special responsibility to break down walls of segregation that literally still scar Belfast.