Northern Ireland's Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former top IRA guerrilla, urged Iraqis on Saturday to learn from the experience of his homeland, which suffered decades of sectarian conflict then found peace.
McGuinness was addressing a conference on national reconciliation in Baghdad that brought together politicians from across Iraq's sectarian and ethnic divide.
The participants - who included prominent Iraqi politicians - issued a communique of principles at the end of the meeting that they said should be used to heal Iraq's divisions.
McGuinness is an Irish Catholic nationalist and member of Sinn Fein, the political ally of the Irish Republic Army (IRA), which fought to expel British troops from Northern Ireland.
McGuinness, who had been a former commander in the IRA in the 1970s, was one of the top Sinn Fein politicians who sought a negotiated peace through a power sharing agreement in 1998 with the pro-British Unionists.
"We learnt an awful lot. At that time (of the peace talks) the Unionists wouldn't travel in the same air plane as (us), they wouldn't eat in the same canteen, they wouldn't sleep in the same sleeping quarters," McGuinness said.
"Now here we are, 10 years on, sitting down around a government table together."
The IRA officially ended its armed campaign in 2005, after calls from Sinn Fein.
The Baghdad conference brought together Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs as well as Kurds. Delegates from South Africa, including businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, who played a role in talks to end apartheid, also attended the conference at a hotel in the heavily guarded Green Zone government compound.
