Sinn Fein Head Requests Help of Ulster Protestants

The president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, appealed to Northern Ireland’s Protestants on Saturday to ignore their leaders and work together toward a new Ireland.

“We need them because a peaceful, just and united society must include all sections of the Irish people. We do not seek to exclude,” Gerry Adams said in his keynote address to Sinn Fein’s annual conference.

The weekend conference inside Dublin’s elegant Mansion House, the mayor’s residence, demonstrated the changed fortunes of the movement. Sinn Fein was banned from using the facility for four years because of IRA violence.

In his 50-minute speech to about 1,000 delegates, Adams was appealing over the heads of Northern Ireland’s Protestant unionist leaders, James Molyneaux and the Rev. Ian Paisley, who fear an Anglo-Irish peace initiative will end the province’s British status and threaten its Protestant majority.

“I am convinced that there is an increasing questioning of traditional political positions among ordinary Protestants,” Adams said, three days after the London and Dublin governments published a “framework document” for a lasting settlement.

“They are seeking real leadership from Mr. Molyneaux and Mr. Paisley. Regrettably they are also being told no,” he said, referring to the unionist catch phrase against change: “Ulster says ‘NO.’ ”