Gerry Adams in Belfast on Monday. (AP)

Belfast, March 26 (Reuters): Northern Ireland’s main Protestant and Catholic parties agreed today to start sharing power on May 8 after their leaders put aside decades of hostility to hold a historic first meeting.

Hardline Protestant cleric Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), sat side-by-side with Gerry Adams, head of the mainly Catholic Sinn Fein, to announce the ground-breaking deal to govern the British province.

“We must not allow our justified loathing of the horrors and tragedies of the past to become a barrier to creating a better and more stable future for our children,” Paisley said after the meeting at Belfast’s imposing assembly building.

Britain and Ireland have pushed Northern Ireland’s feuding parties for years to agree to share power, seeing it as a crucial step towards cementing peace in the province of 1.6 million people that has been torn by years of violence. Adams said that after centuries of conflict and hurt “now there is a new start, with the help of God”.

The meeting brought together Paisley, the 80-year-old cleric famous since the 1960s as an outspoken defender of Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the 58-year-old Adams, once hunted by the British army as a guerrilla suspect.

Paisley has always refused to talk to Adams because of Sinn Fein’s alliance with the IRA guerrilla group which was responsible for nearly half of the 3,600 killings during 30 years of sectarian conflict. But today, both men sat within a few feet of each other around a table. There was no public handshake.

Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain said the meeting was “a graphic manifestation of the power of politics over bigotry, bitterness and horror”.

The power-sharing government will run Northern Ireland’s day-to-day affairs but London will retain sovereignty over the province, which has a Protestant majority. His popularity undermined by the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair was eager for a breakthrough in Northern Ireland to seal his peace-broking legacy.