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Cameron in Belfast for N Ireland deal

11 December 2014 21:26 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. British Prime Minister David Cameron has called on Northern Ireland's political leaders to strike a deal on outstanding disputes for the sake of the people who live in the region, APA reports quoting Press TV.

Cameron, who has now joined his Irish counterpart Enda Kenny for multi-party talks aimed at bringing stability to Northern Ireland, told reporters he was optimistic that a deal could be reached with local politicians.

Speaking outside the negotiating venue, Cameron said he and Kenny would press local leaders to concede ground to their rivals once again so that Northern Ireland's five-party administration, led by the Irish Catholics of Sinn Fein and British Protestants of the Democratic Unionist Party, could be repaired.

Cameron said the talks represented "the crucial phase" of a 9-week-old diplomatic push, with all sides agreed that a deal or defeat must be declared by December 24.

"We have got to demonstrate we can resolve these issues," he said outside Stormont House.

"The people inside this room will be discussing and talking about them but the people outside the room, they are the people that matter. They want to see their politicians deliver."

Failure to reach a deal could mean the 2015 collapse of the local administration and a restoration of direct London rule, the system that prevailed from 1972 through most of the early 2000s.

Northern Ireland is now governed by a five-party power-sharing administration, set up under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended 30 years of violence between largely Catholic Irish nationalists and mainly Protestant pro-British unionists.

Still, politics remains bogged down by long-standing disputes over issues such as the flying of the British and Irish flags, traditional parades by loyalists and nationalists and the toxic legacy of the past.