Documentary : It’s Politics Unusual in Belfast’s City Hall : In the capital of Northern Ireland, the political theater is marked by tumult and shouting. The council’s open sessions reflect the divisions in the fractured British province.

As usual, Mairtin O Muilleoir was struggling to make a point.

“Lord Mayor! Lord Mayor!” he shouted into his hand-held microphone. Over and over, delivered as though to an impertinent pup, came the cold reply: “Sit down , you.”

When the Roman Catholic city councilor finally gave up and flopped exasperated onto his padded bench, from across the chamber divide his Protestant peers enjoyed a good, hearty laugh.

Such is the polarized state of democracy, Ulster-style. For those who doubt that political reforms will ever bring harmony to Northern Ireland, you just can’t beat Belfast City Hall for a sobering illustration.

Councils in Northern Ireland today operate under severe restrictions, having been stripped in 1972 of much of their power by the British government when local rule--long geared toward discriminating against Catholic residents--proved unable to cope with the rising violence.

Britain closed Northern Ireland’s Protestant-dominated Parliament, Stormont, as well, and in its place installed direct rule from London. Since then, the Northern Ireland Office has seen initiative after initiative shot down by local political parties mired in mutual mistrust.

Landmark talks begun here last week and expected to last into July are to bring together Protestant and Catholic representatives from Northern Ireland, Britain and the Republic of Ireland for face-to-face talks on restoring stronger local government to the province. Most commentators agree that the greatest obstacle to any new arrangement is not London-Dublin relations but the diametrically opposed aspirations of Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics.

Symptomatic of that friction is the Belfast council, technically the largest power-sharing, democratic forum in the six counties of Northern Ireland.

In practice, however, the council is hardly that. Housed in a grandiose Victorian capital dome that dominates the downtown skyline, the council’s 50 members meet monthly to rubber-stamp legislation hammered out in private committee. Every committee chairman and vice chairman is, and has always been, a Protestant Unionist.

The council maintains a facade of industriousness despite its relatively few responsibilities. Overstaffed committees ensure that parks are clean, sports centers are equipped, garbage gets collected and the dog catcher is appointed.

Not exactly the stuff of grand political intrigue. Most councilors are left with a lot of idle time on their hands to hone their demagoguery. As a result, councilors from all sides of the Northern Irish divide do agree on one point--in public session, the Belfast council is a circus.

“Ninety-nine percent of the goings-on here are utter nonsense. Some of ‘em don’t have anything more substantial to do than to pick away at each other. It can be very mean-spirited,” said Steve McBride of the centrist Alliance Party--the only political grouping that maintains a cross-community appeal. “If nothing else,” he added philosophically, “the council makes for good theater.”

Above the ornately oak-engraved and burgundy-leathered chamber, citizens sit at two public viewing galleries. On this occasion they appear to have voluntarily segregated themselves along Catholic-Protestant lines: One clump of sandy-haired men in suits and ties bellows at the Unionist politicians’ wisecracks, while at the other viewers’ box, the mostly dark-locked, leather-jacketed men sit beside a priest in glum silence, coming to life only when “their” representatives go briefly on the verbal offensive.

Below, by most accounts, lies even less harmony.

The two factions--Protestant and Catholic, the pro-British versus the pro-Irish--directly face each other: six varieties of Unionists on the one side, three political groupings of nationalists on the other, including eight members of Sinn Fein (pronounced shin fane), the party that supports the Irish Republican Army. Shoehorned to their right is the six-strong Alliance Party camp, looking resolutely middle-class and friendless. Reporters uncomfortably seated in the no-man’s-land between the opposing benches move their heads back and forth to the unfolding tennis match.

Each meeting begins with the proper pomp, as the lord mayor, currently the thickly spectacled Official Unionist Fred Cobain, walks in, escorted by a tuxedo-clad, top-hatted aide hefting a weighty mace. The Sinn Fein members arrive en masse a few minutes late; more than half of their rivals from the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which opposes violence in the Catholic-nationalist cause, do not show up at all.

Unable to set its own public-housing policy or make an economic plan for the surrounding downtown, the council seems to devote most of its time to highly partisan diatribes.

At one recent day’s proceedings, for example, Unionist Frank Millar argued that British armed forces should use the same overwhelming force mounted against the Iraqis in the Persian Gulf against the Irish Republican Army--”the forces of evil that operate from the sewers of Ulster!” as he termed them.

“The British army is not allowed to fight a war here! The only ones able to fight this war is (that) bunch across the aisle!” Millar, a 65-year-old retired dockworker stiffened by spinal surgery, shouted across to the Sinn Fein members. “They’re pretendin’ to be liberals--now I don’t like liberals anyway, but especially not the ones who go round with automatic weapons in their fanny pockets!

“I wish there was some place we could push every republican, and cut off the flow of food and water and heat!” Millar continued unabated, wishing aloud for economic sanctions against “Shinners” within the Catholic minority ghettos.

Each of the “constitutional” parties (that is, those expressing opposition to political violence) got their say in turn. Nigel Dodds of the Democratic Unionist Party, a more belligerent brand of Official Unionism, stood to complain of “Iraq’s blood brothers in the IRA.” Alban Maginness of the SDLP maintained, “You cannot solve this problem by military means.”

John Alderdice, the well-reasoned leader of the Alliance Party, pointed out that Millar’s call for the army to wage “war” against the IRA would fly in the face of British policy, which treats convicted IRA men as criminals, not prisoners of war, and would lend credibility to the IRA as a military force.

“Just shoot them!” suggested a stone-faced woman dressed in baggy purple.

She was Elizabeth Seawright, elected to represent the self-styled “Protestant Unionist” party after the murder four years ago of her councilor husband, George Seawright. (The militant loyalist, who campaigned under the slogan “A Protestant candidate for a Protestant people,” had made an infamous comment during a heated board of education meeting that Roman Catholics “and their priests” should be burned.)

Finally, Sinn Fein’s Gerard McGuigan rose to speak against the violence in the Middle East--and there was a stampede of Official Unionists out of the room in search of coffee or tea.

Only a few stalwart Democratic Unionists--spurning the traditional Protestant policy of refusing to dignify speaking Sinn Feiners with their presence--remained to ridicule McGuigan as loudly as possible, and maybe grab a few IRA-flailing headlines in the process.

Rhonda Paisley, elected on the weight of the name of her father, the Rev. Ian Paisley, founder of the Democratic Unionists, was first to seize upon McGuigan’s alleged hypocrisy. “These people have supported the killing of thousands of people in Northern Ireland,” she charged.

Her raspy recriminations mingled with those of fellow Democratic Unionist Sammy Wilson, who had only just taken off his motorcycle helmet and sat down. “What statesmen these people are!” He gestured toward the Sinn Fein members and tossed his head: “Since when were you concerned about killing people?”

Outside the chamber and down the street, as if on cue, the army performed a “controlled explosion” on a suspicious abandoned car. “Hope that wasn’t your motor (car), Sammy!” someone shouted.

At that, this meeting was an improvement of sorts on some. The previous week, for instance, the session lasted just four minutes from gavel to gavel; Unionist and Alliance councilors sprinted out of the chamber after passing a parcel of motions by voice vote. Sinn Fein was left standing without a quorum needed for its motion to promote the Gaelic language.

Alderman Wilson, a former lord mayor, vehemently defends that and other Unionist gambits to keep elected Sinn Fein representatives from speaking.

“If Sinn Fein touches it, it’s poison,” said Wilson, a schoolteacher. “Doesn’t matter what they’re pushing, they won’t be heard in here. I’ll shout myself blue to keep them from getting anywhere.” Just because tens of thousands of the city’s Catholic residents vote for “the IRA-Sinn Fein boys,” added Nigel Dodds, right-hand man to Paisley, that doesn’t mean he should deal with them.

“The people who elect me are on the receiving end of a campaign of terror,” Dodds said. “One minute you’re sitting in the home consoling some woman, maybe whose husband, or brother, or son has been murdered. Then you come into the council chamber, and 10 feet from us are the Sinn Feiners who are carrying out this terror, gloating about it! Now, you can’t expect rational human beings to react other than strongly to that.” Fra McCann is a Sinn Fein councilor representing west Belfast’s Divis Flats, the worst public housing tract in Northern Ireland, just a five-minute walk west from City Hall. The broad-framed redhead maintains he is no more a mouthpiece for terrorism than are the Unionists.

“The Unionists support the right of 30,000 soldiers and policemen to hassle the nationalist community,” McCann asserted.

“It is strange and amusing that the Unionists can talk about democracy in a place like this. The City Hall is the bastion of loyalism in the Six Counties,” he said, using a republican term for Northern Ireland. “It’s the old boys’ club of the Unionists. Sinn Fein is here to bring their sectarianism and bigotry out in the open. We refuse to be shut down by Unionists. We will speak.”

No faction in the council is publicly keen on cozying up with the British officials in the Northern Ireland Office, which wields the purse strings--and therefore, the real power--from its Stormont Castle residence.

Such stubborn realities have made the achievement of the current minister for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, all the more remarkable.

Brooke’s 14-month effort to launch formal talks among the various groups with a stake in the conflict often seemed on the verge of being scuttled--either by Protestant politicians afraid of giving ground to the “disloyal minority,” or by Catholic politicians insisting upon a precise role for the Irish Republic in any negotiations. The eminently patient Brooke delivered a March ultimatum in the House of Commons, effectively calling for the various parties to put up or shut up.

The result was the discussions begun last week, which notably exclude Sinn Fein. Nonetheless, they are being heralded as providing a crucial step toward installing a fair, responsible, power-sharing local government in Northern Ireland--an honorable aim, undoubtedly, in the eyes of the majority of Northern Irish citizens who would like to see their home stable and peaceful.

But the experience of Belfast City Council sounds an unmistakable warning for any such effort. In so divided a land as Northern Ireland, any system that maintains the institution of majority rule--as most Protestants appear to insist upon--runs the risk of being viewed by Catholics as what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.”

The bold banner perched atop the City Hall’s dome speaks volumes about what Peter Brooke is up against. Its blood-red lettering has faded little since council Unionists ordered it there five years ago. It reads in uncompromising simplicity: BELFAST SAYS NO.

Northern Ireland’s Potpourri of Parties

* OFFICIAL UNIONIST

The largest political party in Northern Ireland, enjoying the support of most Northern Protestants since the province was carved out of Ireland in 1920. Its slogan: “Keeping Ulster British.” It has 14 members on the Belfast council.

* DEMOCRATIC UNIONIST

The offspring of the province’s most fiery Protestant leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, the DUP is considered more militant than the Official Unionists. It has eight members on the council, including Paisley’s daughter Rhonda.

* INDEPENDENT UNIONIST

An umbrella term for an amalgam of feisty misfits and liberal loners occupying five seats on the Unionist bench.

* SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC AND LABOR PARTY

The main nationalist party representing the 600,000 Catholics in Northern Ireland. Founded in 1970 at the peak of the Catholic civil rights movement, the SDLP is committed to reuniting Ireland through nonviolent means. Its leader, John Hume, is a favorite in Irish-American political circles, but at home the party is considered too middle-of-the-road for many working-class Catholics who support the Irish Republican Army. The SDLP has eight seats on the council.

* SINN FEIN

Considered the legal political wing of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, Sinn Fein (“ourselves alone” in Gaelic) gets about one third of Northern Ireland’s Catholic vote. It, too, has eight council seats.

* ALLIANCE

The province’s only party to draw voters from both sides of the divide since its foundation in 1970, the Alliance today polls about 10% of the vote but is considered too liberal for most Protestant Unionists, and too committed to the link with Britain for most Catholic nationalists. It has six council seats.

* WORKERS PARTY

The political heirs of the official IRA, today the Workers Party has foresworn the use of violence as a means to achieve political reforms. It is committed to uniting working-class Protestants and Catholics in a new socialist Ireland, and its support is confined to Catholic ghettos. It has one council seat.