Election '97: Sinn Fein voices poll dream

Sinn Fein yesterday refashioned its standard annual conference as an election rally, its leaders emphasising their twin goals of electoral advance and a renewal of the peace process.

Party president Gerry Adams declared that the election of a new government in London created a new opportunity to reconstruct the peace process and promised that the party would work with whatever governments emerged in London and in Dublin.

Mr Adams devoted an unusual amount of his speech to appeals for increased dialogue between republicans and Unionists, and the conference was told that Sinn Fein members were having on-going private talks with Protestants.

The republican approach was summarised by Martin McGuinness who declared: "Sinn Fein's priorities are primarily the rebuilding of the process and increasing our mandate in the forthcoming elections on both sides of the border."

Mr Guinness roused delegates when he claimed that Sinn Fein was winning in three Ulster seats - West Belfast, Mid-Ulster and West Tyrone.

The gathering, which was marked by an absence of dissent, was held in a hotel in Co Monaghan in the Irish Republic. An estimated 700 delegates took their seats in a cavernous dance hall underneath highly inappropriate red, white and blue neon disco lights. Behind the platform a large slogan proclaimed: "A new opportunity for peace" while an adjacent frieze bore the rather more backward-looking slogan of: "Providence sent the potato blight, but England sent the famine."

For much of the day, speakers toured the gamut of lesser issues which party chairman Mitchel McLaughlin described as essential "for any party that intends to impact on the political mainstream."

Delegates lambasted Dublin for "unjustly prosecuting ordinary, decent people" for not paying local water and service charges, for inadequate aid to hard-pressed fishing communities, and for ignoring rural depopulation.

Such is the bread and butter of Caoimhghin O'Caolain, the party's best hope for a seat in the Dail in Dublin since IRA hunger strikers were elected in 1981. A dapper, dark-suited former bank official, now a county councillor, he faced delegates all day from the platform with a beaming smile.

He has built up a fair amount of local support by filling in border roads excavated by the British Army. His perceived chance of success in the Irish election which is expected next month, explained the siting of the event outside its normal venue of Dublin.

But the event was primarily a carefully choreographed showcase for candidates. Martin McGuinness called for a strong electoral mandate "that will make it extremely difficult for either government to ignore our democratic right to represent our electorate in negotiations." Vice President Pat Doherty, standing in West Tyrone, reaffirmed to strong applause the party's demands for the release of long-term prisoners, including some whom he said had served more than 20 years in British jails. Bernadette O'Hagan, who is standing in the Upper Bann constituency, pressed for restrictions on loyalist marches during the Orange marching season.

In his speech, Mr Adams said: "Imagine an Ireland in which the guns are silent permanently - an Ireland in which all of the people of this island are at peace with each other and with our neighbours in Britain. Some wills say this is a dream, bit it is a dream which we can turn into a reality."