Belfast blast fails to derail key move
Source: Agencies |
April 13, 2010, Tuesday
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NORTHERN Ireland's Catholic and Protestant leaders elected a new justice minister yesterday, reaching a new peacemaking milestone despite an audacious bomb attack hours earlier on the province's British spy headquarters.
The Real IRA splinter group admitted responsibility for forcing a Belfast cabbie to drive the bomb to the gates of Palace Barracks, the high-security home of the anti-terrorist agency MI5 in Northern Ireland.
The blast caused little damage to the base or nearby homes, and nobody was seriously injured. But it did dramatically underscore the problems facing Northern Ireland's new Justice Department in seeking to build greater support for law and order, particularly in a minority Catholic community that still harbors Irish Republican Army diehards.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander who is the senior Catholic in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, said yesterday's election of a justice minister after years of negotiations on the matter would narrow the ground in which dissidents could operate.
The bomb "may well have been placed outside Palace Barracks, but the real target of that explosion was the destruction of the peace process and the political institutions," McGuinness told the Northern Ireland Assembly shortly before the vote.
David Ford, who leads a small cross-community party called Alliance, was elected justice minister thanks to support from Sinn Fein and the major Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists.
McGuinness called the dissidents' sporadic bombings and shootings "a waste of time, totally futile, because the political landscape has changed forever."
Senior police officers said the bomb could easily have killed civilians living beside the base in Holywood, a prosperous Belfast suburb, but for the bravery of the taxi driver. He had been ordered by three dissident gunmen to deliver the bomb to the base and not raise any alarm - or else he or his family members would be executed.
But police said the man, who was not publicly identified, shouted "It's a bomb!" as soon as he parked outside a perimeter entrance.
Twenty minutes later, officers were still evacuating elderly couples and families from nearby houses when the bomb detonated, showering the roofs and front yards with shrapnel and debris but hitting nobody.
The blast happened just 24 minutes past the stroke of midnight, when Britain officially transferred authority to Belfast's new Justice Department. That act - the focus of years of painstaking negotiations - ended 38 straight years of British control of Northern Ireland's criminal justice system.
The Real IRA splinter group admitted responsibility for forcing a Belfast cabbie to drive the bomb to the gates of Palace Barracks, the high-security home of the anti-terrorist agency MI5 in Northern Ireland.
The blast caused little damage to the base or nearby homes, and nobody was seriously injured. But it did dramatically underscore the problems facing Northern Ireland's new Justice Department in seeking to build greater support for law and order, particularly in a minority Catholic community that still harbors Irish Republican Army diehards.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander who is the senior Catholic in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, said yesterday's election of a justice minister after years of negotiations on the matter would narrow the ground in which dissidents could operate.
The bomb "may well have been placed outside Palace Barracks, but the real target of that explosion was the destruction of the peace process and the political institutions," McGuinness told the Northern Ireland Assembly shortly before the vote.
David Ford, who leads a small cross-community party called Alliance, was elected justice minister thanks to support from Sinn Fein and the major Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists.
McGuinness called the dissidents' sporadic bombings and shootings "a waste of time, totally futile, because the political landscape has changed forever."
Senior police officers said the bomb could easily have killed civilians living beside the base in Holywood, a prosperous Belfast suburb, but for the bravery of the taxi driver. He had been ordered by three dissident gunmen to deliver the bomb to the base and not raise any alarm - or else he or his family members would be executed.
But police said the man, who was not publicly identified, shouted "It's a bomb!" as soon as he parked outside a perimeter entrance.
Twenty minutes later, officers were still evacuating elderly couples and families from nearby houses when the bomb detonated, showering the roofs and front yards with shrapnel and debris but hitting nobody.
The blast happened just 24 minutes past the stroke of midnight, when Britain officially transferred authority to Belfast's new Justice Department. That act - the focus of years of painstaking negotiations - ended 38 straight years of British control of Northern Ireland's criminal justice system.
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