TERRORISM : North Ireland Sectarian Strife at New Depths : ‘Cruel enemy must be destroyed,’ a Protestant leader says of IRA bombings. Draconian plans strike fear in the Catholic minority.

The new year has brought new depths of division to this British-ruled corner of Ireland as mounting IRA terror provokes Protestant leaders to preach “war” against Catholic republicans.

Thousands of mourners turned out this week to bury eight Protestant laborers who were killed last Friday when an Irish Republican Army bomb tore apart their minibus as they headed home from work on a British army base. It was the largest civilian death count since the IRA’s 1987 killing of 11 Protestants at a ceremony for British war dead.

“This was mass murder,” said Brian Mawhinney, the British security minister, after the minibus bombing.

Such words ring increasingly hollow among Protestant Unionists, who are impatient with a British policy that they portray as “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

“There is a cruel enemy in Ulster that must be destroyed,” said the Rev. William McCrea, a Democratic Unionist member of the British Parliament in whose district the minibus attack occurred. “We’ve had enough of the ‘softly, softly’ stuff. We are being left open to IRA slaughter.”

McCrea’s party has handed British authorities a platter of Draconian plans designed, in the words of its leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, to “have a thorough go once and for all at the IRA.” The wish list includes plans to “seal the border” with the Republic of Ireland, form a 50,000-member “citizens’ ” militia, issue identity cards to citizens over age 14, impose curfews on republican districts and ban Sinn Fein, the legal political party that supports the IRA.

More troops only make more targets, argue the hard-liners, who are urging that soldiers be empowered to arrest or kill suspected IRA members regardless of the degree of evidence against them.

This agenda is popular among Ulster’s 900,000 Protestants, who bear the brunt of IRA violence. It strikes fear in Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic minority, which would likely suffer in any military clampdown.

Unionist critics argue that there is no military solution to the divisions in Northern Irish society. They cite what happened in the early 1970s when security chiefs sought to strangle the burgeoning republican movement. One-sided curfews and the arrest of several hundred Catholics without charges only served to swell IRA ranks and institutionalize violence, they say.

The IRA defended its “military action” against the construction workers, whom it labeled “collaborators,” and warned other civilians working for the British forces to “desist immediately.”

BACKGROUND: The guerrilla group, into its 21st year of a campaign to force Britain out of the province, since 1985 has killed 27 civilians--as “legitimate military targets” for having provided goods or services to security bases.

The IRA forms only one element in Ulster’s equation of sectarian and political violence, however. Protestant extremists, so-called “loyalists,” last year proved determined to slay Catholics in tit-for-tat retaliation for IRA killings. Of the 94 people killed in 1991--the highest death toll in nine years--the IRA and other republican paramilitary personnel killed 40, while loyalist gunmen claimed 38 victims, often based only on their perceived religion.

The army and the 13,000-strong Royal Ulster Constabulary, the province’s heavily armed police force, are clearly being stretched by the IRA’s tactics. Since December, bombs have hit two hotels, a concert hall, the opera house and government buildings in downtown Belfast. Scores of tiny firebombs have torched shops, pubs and stores throughout Northern Ireland.

The British antidote to the terrorist upsurge has been to send in ever more troops and throw a ring of checkpoints around Belfast. The strategy has not stopped the bombing. The IRA easily shifted its violence Wednesday, rocking the province’s second city, Londonderry, with three explosions.

OUTLOOK: According to English defense analyst John Urban, the British army cannot commit many more troops to the province, where about one-fourth of its infantry is bogged down already. Projected cutbacks in the British armed forces already under way, Urban said, suggest that “something like half of all British infantry could end up being tied up in Northern Ireland.”

Paddy Ashdown, leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrat Party, who served in Northern Ireland as a soldier, observed that “peace and long-term security in Northern Ireland will be built by the politicians, not by the soldiers.”