LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Northern Ireland: Northern Ireland Assembly
built 630 days ago
Northern Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, but under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, it had a semiautonomous government. In 1972... after three years of sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics that resulted in more than 400 dead and thousands injured, Britain suspended the Ulster parliament. The Ulster counties were governed directly from London after an attempt to return certain powers to an elected assembly in Belfast.
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Northern Ireland currently has 18 seats in the United Kingdom House of Commons. The Northern Ireland Assembly has 108 MLAs, although this is currently in suspension. It is ... represented in the European Parliament with 3 seats, and at local level by 26 district councils.
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As an administrative division of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland was defined by the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, and has had its own form of devolved government in a similar manner to Scotland and Wales. The Northern Ireland Assembly, established in 1998, has been suspended multiple times but was restored on 8 May 2007.[2][3] Northern Ireland's legal system descends from the pre-1920 Irish legal system (as does the legal system of the Republic of Ireland), and is therefore based on common law. It is separate from the jurisdictions of England and Wales or Scotland.[4]
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The Northern Ireland Assembly was established as part of the Belfast Agreement and meets in Parliament Buildings. The Assembly is the prime source of authority for all devolved responsibilities and has full legislative and executive authority.
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Under the Good Friday Agreement, properly known as the Belfast Agreement, voters elected a new Northern Ireland Assembly to form a Northern Irish parliament. Every party that reaches a specific level of support gains the right to name a member of its party to government and claim a ministry. Ulster Unionist party leader David Trimble became First Minister of Northern Ireland. The Deputy Leader of the SDLP, Seamus Mallon, became Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, though his party's new leader, Mark Durkan, subsequently replaced him. The Ulster Unionists, SDLP, Sinn F�in and the Democratic Unionist Party each had ministers by right in the power-sharing assembly. The Assembly and its Executive are both currently suspended over unionist threats over the alleged delay in the Provisional IRA implementing its agreement to decommission its weaponry, and ... the alleged discovery or an IRA spy-ring operating in the heart of the civil service.
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On Oct. 14, the British government again assumed direct rule of Northern Ireland, after the Unionists threatened to quit the Assembly in protest of suspected spying activity by the IRA. In March and April 2003, negotiations were again under way to reinstate the Northern Ireland Assembly. But Sinn Fein's vague language, weakly pledging that its “strategies and disciplines will not be inconsistent with the Good Friday Agreement,” caused Tony Blair to challenge Sinn Fein once and for all to make a clear, unambiguous pledge to renounce using the paramilitary for political means. According to the New York Times (April 24, 2003), “virtually every newspaper in Britain and Ireland has editorialized in favor of full disarmament, and the Irish government, traditionally sympathetic to Sinn Fein, is almost as adamant about the matter as London is.”
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Northern Ireland Assembly