Adams `prepared to compromise'

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The leader of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, said yesterday that the party was prepared for compromise in the all-party talks on Northern Ireland that open next week and appealed to the Unionists not to act on their boycott threat.

Mr Adams, along with Sinn Fein's chief negotiator to the talks, Martin McGuinness, and Sinn Fein's single Eire MP, Caoimhghin O'Caolain, was in Washington at the start of a four-day US visit designed to sell the party's participation in the talks to republican sympathisers in the United States and to the American public.

He said he was concerned to differentiate between the party's demands for an end to "British jurisdiction" in Ulster and the presence of Unionists in Eire. "We do not want them to leave. Unionists have as much right to be there as we do."