David Trimble was ‘extraordinarily rude’ to Tony Blair at Good Friday talks

Newly released 1999 briefing by Irish civil servant reveals lack of trust during tense peace negotiations

David Trimble was “extraordinarily rude” to Tony Blair during tense negotiations about the implementation of the Good Friday agreement, accusing the then prime minister of laying a “crude trap” for unionists, one Irish official wrote of the encounter in 1999.

The meeting between Blair and Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist party, took place in Belfast as the British prime minister and Ireland’s taoiseach Bertie Ahern met all the Northern Ireland parties to discuss the steps that needed to be taken to implement the peace accord.

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Sunak risks ripping up Good Friday agreement over Rwanda, senior Tories say

Concerns echo White House remarks that blocking human rights laws could undermine Northern Ireland peace process

Rishi Sunak risks ripping up the Northern Ireland peace process if he blocks human rights laws so the UK can deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, senior Conservatives have said.

After similar concerns from the White House on Thursday, the MPs said widely reported plans from Downing Street to disregard parts of the Human Rights Act could undermine the Good Friday agreement and damage UK-US relations.

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Colin Beattie ‘steps back’ as SNP treasurer following arrest amid party finance investigation – as it happened

This live blog has now closed, you can read more on this story here

PMQs is starting in five minutes.

The Cabinet Office has just published the revised list of ministers’ interests. This is the document that is supposed get updated every six months, but which has not been updated for around a year – partly because it’s the job of the No 10 independent adviser on ministes’ interests (aka, the ethics adviser), and for months the post was empty because two of Boris Johnson’s resigned, and then he gave up trying to find a replacement.

The prime minister’s wife is a venture capital investor. She owns a venture capital investment company, Catamaran Ventures UK Limited, and a number of direct shareholdings.

As the prime minister set out in his letter to the chair of the liaison committee on 4 April 2023, this includes the minority shareholding that his wife has in relation to the company, Koru Kids. The guide to the categories of interest (section 7, pages 4-6) sets out the independent adviser’s approach to the inclusion of interests declared in relation to spouses, partners and close family members within the list. The prime minister’s letter of 4 April is available at https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/38992/documents/191876/default/

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Derry crowd petrol-bombs police vehicle as Joe Biden heads to Northern Ireland

Land Rover was monitoring a dissident republican parade commemorating the 1916 Rising

The British and Irish governments have condemned petrol bomb attacks on police in Derry on the eve of Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland.

A small crowd threw petrol bombs and other missiles at a police Land Rover during a parade by dissident republicans in the Creggan area of the city on Monday. The vehicle briefly caught fire and was withdrawn.

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Good Friday agreement ‘based on compromise’, Sunak says on 25th anniversary

PM says ‘work to be done’ to restore government at Stormont ahead of Biden meeting on Tuesday

The Good Friday agreement was “based on compromise”, which should be the defining message for the next chapter in Northern Ireland, Rishi Sunak has said on the peace deal’s 25th anniversary.

The prime minister said there was “work to be done” by a new generation of politicians to restore government at Stormont “as soon as possible”, as he and Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, prepare to intensify work to broker a way out of the deadlock.

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Biden brings forward Belfast visit, putting meeting with king in doubt

Charles and president likely to instead stage back-to-back visits to mark 25 years of Good Friday agreement

Hopes that Joe Biden’s landmark trip to Belfast next month will be rounded off by a meeting with King Charles are fading after the US president brought forward by a week his trip to celebrate 25 years of peace.

It now appears likely the king and the president will stage back-to-back visits in an echo of historic visits to Dublin by Barack Obama and the queen in 2011.

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Biden confirms plan to mark Good Friday agreement anniversary in Belfast

US president said he intended to visit Northern Ireland and Irish Republic in meeting with Rishi Sunak

Joe Biden has confirmed he plans to visit Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.

He was told by Rishi Sunak “we’d love to have you” when the pair held a face-to-face bilateral meeting on the fringes of the Aukus summit.

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King Charles pledges to ‘seek welfare of all’ in Northern Ireland

New monarch meets politicians and public as he tries to build on late Queen’s efforts at reconciliation

King Charles has resolved to “seek the welfare of all the inhabitants of Northern Ireland”, in a formal response to the region’s assembly on his visit to Hillsborough Castle to meet the public and politicians.

After being greeted by crowds chanting “God save the King” at the gates of the royal residence in County Down, he made the pledge in response to a message of condolence from Alex Maskey, the nationalist Speaker of the Northern Ireland assembly and a former IRA internee.

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US congressmen to fly to London as Northern Ireland protocol concerns grow

Exclusive: Influential delegation likely to underline Biden’s commitment to defend Good Friday agreement

A delegation of influential US congressmen will fly to London within days amid growing concern in the White House about spiralling tensions over the Northern Ireland protocol, the Guardian can reveal.

With the UK government poised to table legislation next week which could revoke parts of the protocol, arrangements are being made for at least half a dozen representatives from the US Congress to fly to Europe for a series of meetings in Brussels, Dublin, London and Belfast.

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Experts scorn UK government claim it can ditch parts of NI protocol

Lawyers reject Liz Truss’s claim that UK is able to dump parts of treaty with EU without its agreement

Claims that the UK government has discovered a legal justification for tearing up large parts of Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland have been greeted with scorn by expert lawyers.

The attorney general, Suella Braverman, has reportedly approved overriding the Northern Ireland protocol on the grounds that it is being unfairly enforced by the EU. Her submission, understood to be based on external advice, claims the EU’s “disproportionate and unreasonable” implementation is undermining the Good Friday agreement (GFA), according to the Times.

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Sinn Féin assembly victory fuels debate on future of union

Leader Mary Lou McDonald raises issue of unification as nationalists become biggest party in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has slipped into political crisis after Sinn Féin’s triumph in the assembly election triggered calls for a referendum on a united Ireland and the Democratic Unionist party vowed to block the formation of a new power-sharing executive at Stormont.

Jubilant Sinn Féin supporters celebrated across the region on Saturday when final vote counts confirmed a historic victory that turned the former IRA mouthpiece into the biggest party, with the right to nominate the first minister.

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Derry to mark 25 years of Good Friday agreement with John Hume musical

Playhouse to stage Beyond Belief in 2023 to ‘say a proper goodbye’ to late SDLP leader who helped persuade IRA to give up arms

A musical drama about the life of John Hume, one of the main forces behind the Good Friday agreement, will be staged next year to mark the 25th anniversary of the historic deal that helped end 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.

Beyond Belief, written by Damian Gorman with music by Brian O’Doherty, is the second part of a “peace-building trilogy” at the Playhouse in Hume’s home town, Derry, after The White Handkerchief, a play about the events of Bloody Sunday, earlier this year.

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NI peace architect accuses Boris Johnson of ‘casual political vandalism’

Jonathan Powell says PM and Brexit ministers risking fragile peace in Northern Ireland and ‘don’t seem to care’

One of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace deal has said Boris Johnson and the former Brexit minister Lord Frost have risked “all the work” the previous generation of politicians put into the Belfast Good Friday agreement by putting their hard ideological beliefs ahead of people.

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and chief negotiator on Northern Ireland, said he was concerned that neither the prime minister nor the recently resigned Brexit minister seemed to understand or care about the fragility of the political settlement in Northern Ireland in 1998.

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‘While there’s British interference, there’s going to be action’: why a hardcore of dissident Irish republicans are not giving up

In the face of scorn and contempt from former IRA members, a small number of dissident groups remain committed to armed action. What do they think they can achieve?

In the early hours of 19 April 2019, Belfast-born Irish republican Anthony McIntyre was awakened by his wife, Carrie, in their home in Drogheda, just south of the border in Ireland. “It’s not true, it can’t be true,” she was saying. “Lyra has been shot dead.”

Drowsy, confused and not quite believing what he had just been told, McIntyre fell back asleep. He awoke the following morning thinking, “What did she tell me?” McIntyre looked online, and saw that it was true: their good friend, the 29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee, had been observing a riot in Derry the previous night when she was shot by a republican gunman.

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UK confirms plan to call time on Troubles prosecutions

Proposals to end prosecutions relating to Troubles before 1998 opposed by Irish government

All criminal prosecutions relating to the Troubles and future attempts to take civil actions would be blocked under UK government plans that have united Northern Ireland’s parties in opposition.

The proposals, which are also opposed by the Irish government, were announced by Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, who told MPs it was a “painful truth” that criminal investigations were unlikely to deliver successful outcomes.

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UK and US gird for a titanic struggle – if they can avoid falling out first

Analysis: Mundane conflicts over sausage exports have no place in high-flown plans for new Atlantic charter

Whatever precise pressure US diplomats put on Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, ahead of Joe Biden’s rather chaotic first photocall with Johnson at the G7 summit at Carbis bay, both sides were keen at their bilateral meeting to put the ugly genie back in the bottle.

The US side claimed there was nothing it had been saying to the British in private about the sanctity of the Good Friday agreement that it had not said in public, adding there had been no presidential directive to the US embassy to heighten the issue via a demarche to Frost, a florid piece of diplomatic jargon of French origin normally reserved for something akin to Russian diplomats caught spying.

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Why Joe Biden is so invested in defending Good Friday agreement

Analysis: Northern Ireland is a rare issue of bipartisan consensus and a pillar of US foreign policy

Joe Biden’s commitment to defending the Good Friday agreement is baked into his political history and identity. But it is also a pillar of US foreign policy, a rare issue of bipartisan consensus in an otherwise hyper-polarised political scene, one of the few stances Biden can take on the world stage without drawing fire from Republicans.

Biden’s emotional attachment to Ireland has been a constant throughout his adult life and has become part of his political identity too. He routinely refers to his mother’s family history and his ties to County Mayo. He quotes Irish poets, and uses the example of British rule in Ireland as a bridge to empathise with persecuted minorities.

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Dominic Raab ‘totally misunderstands’ Northern Ireland Brexit terms, warns EU

European vice-president Maroš Šefčovič says claim about Brussels trying to erect barrier down Irish Sea undermines UK’s reputation

Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has been accused by Brussels of displaying a “total misunderstanding” of the Brexit deal after claiming the EU was trying to erect a barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Maroš Šefčovič, the European commission’s vice-president, said Raab’s comments raised major questions, and warned that Britain was tarnishing its global reputation by ignoring the terms of its agreements with Brussels.

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US-based Sinn Féin support group places ads for vote on Irish unification

Adverts in New York Times, Washington Post and other US papers seek to rally Irish-American support

A US-based Sinn Féin support group has placed half-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post and other US newspapers calling for a referendum on Irish unification.

Friends of Sinn Féin placed the ads on Wednesday to rally Irish-American support behind the party’s push for a referendum in Northern Ireland.

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Gove and Šefčovič reiterate commitment to NI protocol after crisis talks

Joint statement between UK and EU agrees to ‘spare no effort’ in implementing solutions

Michael Gove and the European commission’s vice-president have reiterated their “full commitment” to the Northern Ireland protocol following crisis talks in London.

A joint statement said Gove and Maroš Šefčovič had a “frank but constructive discussion” on Thursday evening, in which they agreed to “spare no effort” in implementing solutions.

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