Northern Ireland: The price of peace

Mr Robinson might take the ball away IN MAY last year John Downey, an oyster farmer from Northern Ireland, was arrested as he tried to catch a flight from London to Greece and charged with the murder of four British soldiers killed by an IRA bomb in 1982. But on February 25th the case against him collapsed. It emerged that he had received a letter from the Northern Ireland Office in 2007 assuring him that he was not wanted by the police. It also transpired that since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998—which paved the way for the current system of power sharing between nationalists and unionists—some 200 such letters had been issued to republicans suspected of paramilitary crimes.The response from Northern Irish unionists was as fractious as it was furious. Peter Robinson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), said he was “incandescent with rage” over the London government’s failure to inform him of the letters. He threatened to quit his job as Northern Ireland’s first minister unless a judicial inquiry is held. He also said darkly that the DUP would never have entered into the current power-sharing agreement had it known...

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