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Greens Issue Clarion Call for an End to 'Toxic Politics' Jun 24 2003


PITY the poor Greens: they have spent months organising a Green Summit at Belfast's Waterfront, involving all their elected representatives in the UK and Ireland - and were blown off the media yesterday by the continuing row in the Ulster Unionist Party.

The irony of this was compounded not only by the coincidental news that radioactive traces, believed to be from Sellafield, have been found in Scottish farm salmon, but by the fact that one of the summit's themes was a call for an end to the ''toxic'' politics of unionism and nationalism.

Northern Ireland leader Dr John Barry remained irrepressibly cheerful, fending off requests for his opinion on the unionist crisis with an enigmatic reply: ''Some spread joy wherever they go, some whenever they go.''

For the record, the four Green Parties from England and Wales, Scotland, the Republic and Northern Ireland endorsed a position paper presented by the Northern Ireland party to use the review of the Agreement later this year ''to make the Agreement work and to move on from the 'toxic politics' of the past''.

At the gathering were seven Scottish Green Party MSPs, six Irish Green Party TDs and one MEP, and one Green Party of England and Wales MEP.

The meeting focused on improving co-ordination and cooperation between the ''Green Parties of these Islands'' on such issues as Sellafield nuclear power station, GMOs ( genetically modified organisms) and the European Convention.

Dr Barry said: ''Of particular importance to us here in Northern Ireland was the positive endorsement from our sister parties of our analysis of the present political situation and our suggestions for moving us forward.

"It means that we campaign on a platform endorsed and fully supported by the other Green Parties of these islands, so we can expect Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh Green parliamentarians to be canvassing with the Green Party in Northern Ireland over the coming months.

"With the review of the Belfast Agreement due this autumn, there is an opportunity to deepen the democratic culture in Northern Ireland and thereby deliver on the Agreement's underlying vision of a people and a region liberated from the toxic politics of either/or choices contrived by the 'ethnic entrepreneurs' who have failed to think, act and lead the people beyond the constraints of nation-statism.

"The Green Party in Northern Ireland supports the Agreement and while we look forward to a rigorous review, we oppose those who do seek the Agreement's rejection, abandonment or renegotiation and more to the point, their motives.

"While recognising its flaws, the Agreement represents the best, if not the only, chance in a generation of creating the conditions for the emergence of a region that can take its rightful place in a globalised and globalising world where borders, identities, economies and political ideas are no longer fixed but are rather continually negotiated and renegotiated.

"The Green Party believes that the negotiators of the Agreement produced much of the preconditions and infrastructure for taking us forward.

"The tragedy, since 1998, is that the architects of the Agreement - the political parties - have demonstrated that they are not necessarily the vehicles for steering us towards the hope and the vision that they negotiated in spite of themselves.''