Dalai Lama talks peace with Sinn Fein

The Dalai Lama is meeting political and religious leaders in Northern Ireland

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, has met Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, the republican political party, at the start of a three-day visit to Northern Ireland.

The Buddhist leader met Adams at a Roman Catholic monastery in west Belfast where the Sinn Fein leader is the area's member of parliament.

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Organisers of the visit said the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, would meet other religious and political leaders as well as representatives of victims of the Northern Ireland troubles during his stay.

Officials said the two men would spend a few minutes in silent prayer at a shrine before having a brief private conversation.

The Dalai Lama was later due to walk through a nearby, sectarian flashpoint accompanied by clerics from the province's majority Protestant and minority Catholic communities.

"The Dalai Lama is coming to visit the people of west Belfast to listen to them and share in their struggle for peace and share with them his own experience of how peace works," Father Laurence Freeman, one of the organisers of the visit, said.

Freeman is spiritual director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, which has organised a conference aiming to explore how religious harmony can contribute to peacemaking.

Adams is a pivotal figure in the peace process underpinned by ceasefires from the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defence Force.

An uneasy peace founded out of the Good Friday peace accord has been punctuated by sporadic violence.

A renegade republican faction opposed to the peace drive accused the mainstream IRA of killing one of its members in Belfast last Friday. The IRA denies the accusation.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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