It could take until 2009 for the next opportunity to achieve a power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland if the political parties fail to strike a deal by the British and Irish governments' deadline of November 24th, Northern Secretary Peter Hain has warned.
It was not an exercise in "melodrama" to state that the current opportunity for a deal was a "defining moment for an entire political class in Northern Ireland", Mr Hain told the annual conference of the British-Irish Association in Oxford on Saturday night.
At the conference on Friday night Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern said if there were no agreement by November the governments would press ahead with new "partnership" arrangements, which some unionists have interpreted as a threat to the sovereignty of the North's union with Britain.
In his speech Mr Hain sought to reassure unionists, stressing the consent principle of the Belfast Agreement, while also generally warning that Northern politicians must grasp the chance to achieve a devolution deal. He said unionists had a "valid, honourable and valued place within the United Kingdom".
He was aware of the concept of the unionist siege mentality but said outside observers had difficulty understanding it considering that the Republic had dispensed with its territorial claim over Northern Ireland and accepted that there could be no change in the North's sovereignty without the agreement of the people of Northern Ireland.
"It has allowed relationships between North and South and east and west to flourish. And it has allowed the Taoiseach to declare what everyone knows but found difficult to state: that the constitutional issue is 'settled' and can only be revisited through peaceful and democratic means.
"The reality is that the physical force tradition in mainstream republicanism has, belatedly, come to and end," Mr Hain told the conference, a gathering of British and Irish politicians and officials, academics, clergy, journalists and others with an interest in the peace process.
Regardless of dissident activity, "the conditions simply do not exist to sustain any community support for a campaign of violence now in Northern Ireland. The siege has been lifted".
Mr Hain said the "greatest threat to loyalism today is not political or constitutional at all - it is from self-inflicted violence and criminality".
The opportunity for a deal could not be delayed beyond November 24th. "And to speak of such an opportunity as being a defining moment for an entire political class in Northern Ireland is not melodrama. If we fail to restore power-sharing this autumn, there are very strong reasons for believing that the two governments are unlikely to be in a position to make another attempt to bring the parties together until after the next Irish and then British general election [scheduled for 2009]."
He said 2009 would be the 400th anniversary of the Plantation of Ulster, a date when Northern Ireland could have progressed politically, socially and economically by striking a deal or a date when the North had stagnated through political failure.
