Republican Sinn Fein has condemned the Stormont Assembly and Executive and has proposed alternative political arrangements. Speaking at a press conference in west Belfast yesterday, the party president, Mr Ruairi O Bradaigh, said the current institutions in the North were undemocratic and doomed to failure.
He said "Eire Nua", which proposes a nine-county Ulster parliament, was a viable alternative. The federal plan, which first emerged in 1971, has been updated by Republican Sinn Fein. Mr O Bradaigh said it involved a central parliament in Dublin and four provincial parliaments, with the maximum devolution of power in the provinces to regional boards and district councils. The new system would follow British disengagement from the North.
"This is our alternative to the Stormont agreement," he said. "It is natural power-sharing based on local majorities in preference to enforced and confined co-operation at Stormont."
Mr O Bradaigh rejected any new police force set up in the North under the Belfast Agreement even if half its recruits were Catholic. "It is often forgotten that 80 per cent of the old Royal Irish Constabulary were Catholic and it was the backbone of British rule in Ireland."
He described the Provisional IRA's decision to open its arms dumps to international inspectors as "an act of treachery".