Major, Putting His Career on the Line, Fights to Ensure Peace in Northern Ireland

The first sign of normality came to the north Irish town of Crossmaglen last weekend with a police radar gun for a speeding trap. They issued a sheaf of tickets, thanks to the advantage of surprise. It was the first time the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been in the area with anything but automatic rifles for 20 murderous years.

But the speed traps may not last, because of a very British scene that had the fate of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republican Army’s historic cease-fire announcement trembling in the balance at Downing Street last week.

On the one side, Prime Minister John Major, taking the political risk of his career in trying to swing his hesitant Conservative Party and the deeply suspicious Ulster Unionists behind the chance for a peaceful settlement.

On the other, the Belfast ayatollah, the Rev. Ian Paisley, a man whose passion for the cause of a Protestant Ulster is second only to his fear of his Presbyterian God.

“There have been no secret deals with the IRA,” said Major, standing behind the long and curiously coffin-shaped Cabinet table. “You have my word on that.”

“We have learned before what that is worth,” grunted Paisley, with the hard accents of Belfast that each Sunday carry his sermons of hell and damnation through his packed church.

“If you will not take the word of a British prime minister, this conversation has no purpose,” Major went on.

A silence fell. The founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster glowered. Major gritted his teeth. “Will you?”

More silence.

“Get out of this room,” Major shouted--in the version recounted by Paisley. “Never come back until you are prepared to say I speak the truth.”

Paisley’s closest friend, the American fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones, once observed that Paisley was “a man of another century.”

The century he had in mind was the 17th--the time of England’s civil war, which spilled into Ireland when the forefathers of the Ulster Unionists took up arms against the Catholic King of England, James II, and held the port of Londonderry through a fearsome siege that Unionists celebrate annually with fifes and drums and marches.

It was also the century of God’s soldiers, Oliver Cromwell’s Protestant Ironsides, whose massacre of Irish Catholic prisoners at Drogheda stands out through the bloodstained centuries that make up the history of Britain’s first, and now perhaps its last colony.

In the last elections to the European Parliament, Paisley was triumphantly returned with 170,000 votes. He has sat in the British Parliament since 1970. He leads the Democratic Unionist Party, and he may just hold an effective veto against the best efforts of President Bill Clinton, Major and Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds to craft a peace settlement.

Paisley was the Unionist leader who was pointedly not asked to the White House this April, when Clinton’s spasmodic attempts to get involved in the peace process became serious. Like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), whose former foreign-policy aide Nancy Soderberg has been driving Northern Irish policy from the National Security Council, the Unionists suspected Clinton, too, of partiality for the Catholics.

When Clinton personally overruled his secretary of state, his attorney general and his CIA and FBI directors to grant a U.S. visitors visa to Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, the suspicions hardened.

But then, urged by London and Dublin, Clinton widened his reach, inviting the other Ulster Unionist leader, James Molyneaux, to the White House for talks with Vice President Al Gore and National Security Adviser W. Anthony Lake. That meeting in April, and subsequent phone calls from Lake to Molyneaux pledging U.S. even-handedness in the last days leading up to the IRA’s cease-fire, was the breakthrough in Clinton’s Irish policy.

Molyneaux is 74 and, after leading his Ulster Unionist Party for 15 years, is the veteran of the hard world of Ulster politics. He commands nine seats at Westminster, and since Major’s majority is just 18 seats, Molyneaux has the power to cripple British government.

So far, the IRA’s cease fire is holding. The Ulster Volunteer Force, one of its Protestant counterparts, is teetering on the brink of declaring its own suspension of hostilities. . The even larger Ulster Defense Assn. and its commando wing, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, are vowing to “carry on business as normal.” The day after the IRA cease fire, the UFF shot an almost-blind Catholic man in the back to prove it.

But the hard old man of the IRA, the legendary Joseph Cahill, 74, reprieved from a British death sentence, came to the United States last week to put his personal weight behind the cease-fire order. Dublin sources said he came to stand down three IRA active service logistics units in the United States. Cahill obeyed the IRA’s political decision, and so will most Ulster paramilitary units if their political leaders give cease-fire orders.

The British, Irish and U.S. governments are all steeling themselves to keep pushing the peace process, in the almost certain knowledge that Protestant extremists will try to sabotage it with more killings and provocations. But such half-organized spasms can be withstood, if the Unionist political leaders back the peace.

So far, the combined flattery of Major and Clinton have kept Molyneaux from rejecting the cease fire. He is not a convert to the complex next phase of constitutional negotiations. But he is speaking warmly of an elected Northern Irish assembly where Catholics and Protestants would jointly administer the nuts and bolts of local government.

But as Molyneaux’s rival, Paisley, stormed out of Downing Street last week with that old 1689 siege of Londonderry war cry of “No Surrender,” he stretched a thin political umbrella over the Protestant guerrillas of Ulster.

The good news is that Paisley and the guerrillas are alone. Britain wants to be done with the costly embarrassment, now that the end of the Cold War has removed that age-old strategic fear of Ireland falling into enemy hands. The Irish government is prepared to ask its citizens in a referendum to amend the constitution which calls for a united Ireland.

And as British and Irish MPs sit side by side in the Parliament of Europe, representing two modern and democratic states that cooperate tolerably enough in a new institution that is bigger than both of them, the preconditions for peace are falling into place.

Like that police radar gun at the Crossmaglen speed trap, Paisley and the hard men stand out as an extraordinary oddity. But that may just be the contradictory way that peace will come.

So bitter are Paisley’s suspicions that he fears he is being lured into an IRA trap, in which any new fighting sees the British Army unleashed against the Unionist forces--who still believe they are fighting for the British connection.

To evade that dreadful outcome, Paisley might even be prepared to swallow hard, commend his soul to his vengeful God and take Major’s word.