Foes Gain in Bid to Scuttle Ulster Accord : New Violence Indicates Stronger Role by Protestant Militants

Four and one-half months after Britain and the Irish Republic signed a widely heralded cooperative agreement to reduce sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, there are growing signs that Protestant militants are gaining in their fight to wreck the accord.

A bloody clash earlier this week between riot police and young Protestant demonstrators in the town of Portadown that left 49 injured is viewed here as the latest indicator that the campaign against the agreement, widely resented among Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority, has begun to slip away from moderate politicians advocating peaceful protest.

Attacks Tuesday on the homes of police officers involved in breaking up the Portadown disturbances are an additional indication of this trend.

Would Increase Unrest

If Protestant moderates are eclipsed, it would almost certainly bring to the troubled province a new and higher level of the unrest that the Anglo-Irish accord was specifically designed to reduce.

In the last 17 years, nearly 2,500 people have died in violence between Protestants and Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic minority.

“I’m worried and apprehensive,” said Frank Millar, general secretary of the larger and more moderate of the province’s two Protestant-dominated political parties, the Official Unionist Party. “Conditions are ripe for confrontation and anarchy.”

Any escalation in the level of violence would further complicate efforts to win support for the accord among Protestants, who make up roughly two-thirds of the 1.5-million population in the province, also called Ulster.

Key Moderate Humiliated

Several developments in recent weeks have increased concern among those promoting the agreement. Among them:

--Official Unionist Party leader James Molyneaux, seen as an important voice of moderation among Protestants, has been seriously damaged politically since being humiliated by hard-line members of his party who forced him to withdraw a public commitment to start talks with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the future of the province. The hard-liners had demanded that the accord be suspended first.

Since that incident, last Feb. 25, neither Molyneaux nor other moderates have offered effective leadership. This absence of any firm direction has given an opening to extremists.

--Onset of the so-called “marching season,” a series of ostentatious, often provocative, Protestant and Catholic street parades marking centuries-old battlefield triumphs, provides an array of potential flash points for sectarian clashes.

Banned March

Last Monday’s Portadown disturbances broke out after police tried to ban the first of this year’s marches, a Protestant one, because it would pass near a Catholic neighborhood.

“If this has happened at the start of the marching season, what’s it going to be like in July?” asked Andy Tyrie, chairman of the biggest Protestant paramilitary organization, the Ulster Defense Assn.

The association, which claims a large influx of new members since the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed last November, has a history of vigilante action and exercising its power in the streets.

“We didn’t plan for it, but things are moving in our direction,” Tyrie said.

--The Protestant-dominated police force, until now mainly in conflict with the minority Catholic community, has suddenly been deployed in the streets against Protestants.

Police Under Fire

Although respected as a disciplined force, it faces growing pressures, with individual police officers and their families being subjected to physical and psychological attack from a community that for years saw them as their protectors.

During a 24-hour period ending early Wednesday, one police officer was shot at his home in a Belfast Protestant neighborhood and the homes of two other officers were firebombed, while in the suburban town of Lisburn, police investigating a bus hijacking came under attack from rock-throwing Protestant youths.

“They opened up on Protestants, so Protestants should retaliate,” said one Belfast youth named Martin Gillespie.

In a society where community loyalties are considered extremely important, Protestant police officers are suddenly being branded as traitors. In their initial confrontations with Protestants, the police have held firm, but pressure is bound to mount as tensions rise.

Aside from the British army, only the police stand between the present rumbling unrest and anarchy.

‘Soul-Destroying Burden’

“No civilian police force anywhere in the world is being asked to carry such a soul-destroying burden,” commented Eldon Griffiths, parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation.

The Anglo-Irish agreement is essentially a framework document aimed at giving Catholics a share of political power and added confidence in the political system. It also contains guarantees preserving Protestant majority rule for the foreseeable future.

Despite stiff Protestant resistance, some aspects of the accord have been implemented.

An Anglo-Irish inter-governmental conference that provides the Irish Republic with a formal consultative role in Northern Ireland affairs has met five times, discussing such subjects as boosting security cooperation along Ulster’s border with the republic and improving education and housing opportunities for Catholics.

Goal Out of Reach

But achieving the agreement’s principal goal of transferring political power from London to a provincial government composed of both Protestants and Catholics remains out of reach because of Protestant opposition.

Unless Thatcher can offer some formula to entice Protestant leaders to discuss a devolved government with shared power, there appears little likelihood of movement in the near future.

Although the terms of the accord offer significant guarantees to Northern Ireland’s Protestants, and the level of Irish Republican Army activity has dropped sharply since last November, emotions have overwhelmed fact in the debate about the agreement.

To the majority of Protestants--many of whom admit that they have not read the document nor are familiar with its provisions--it is seen both as an affront because they were not consulted in its drafting and as a first step of a British plan to consign Ulster into a united, Catholic Ireland.

“Opposition to this agreement is growing daily,” Millar said. “You can’t reconcile people by pushing them into confrontation.”