NEWS ANALYSIS : Now Comes Time of Maneuver and Finesse on N. Ireland

As President Clinton bade farewell Saturday to an adoring Irish people who cheered his message of peace, the popular thirst for ending the conflict in ethnically divided Northern Ireland remained clearer than the means of quenching it.

Now comes a delicate time of maneuver and finesse that will test nervous political parties on both sides of the conflict--and the governments encouraging them to forge a lasting peace.

On Tuesday night, with the impending Clinton visit acting as catalyst, Britain and Ireland--which effectively represent different clients in the conflict--broke a long, strained impasse with a surprise agreement to go forward with a twin-track search for peace in Northern Ireland.

They decided to refer the roadblock issue of the surrender of arms by the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitary groups to an international commission headed by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine.

Thus has the peace process quickened more in the past few days than at any time since an IRA cease-fire on Aug. 31, 1994, made peace thinkable for the first time in 25 years of violence between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

Like the subsequent Clinton visit, however, the Anglo-Irish twin-track agreement does not in itself solve anything. Rather, without overcoming the biggest roadblock--arms surrender--it buys time and a chance to find a way around it. The agreement inaugurates a process, not peace, noted Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, the co-architect of the plan with British Prime Minister John Major.

Clinton called the agreement between Britain and Ireland “a brilliant formula which allowed them to continue having discussions” while working out their differences.

Still, the President noted after meeting Northern Ireland’s political leaders in Belfast, “none of the people with whom I spoke yesterday changed their views.”

What remains as clear now as it was before Clinton put America’s shoulder to the peace wheel is that for meaningful peace talks to occur, one side--as ever--must yield.

The British government insists that there be at least a token surrender of IRA arms before Sinn Fein, the group’s political arm, is welcome at peace talks.

But the IRA, which says it agreed to a cease-fire, not a surrender, says it will not “decommission” a single weapon in advance of talks.

The British position mirrors that of political parties representing the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland. They are unionist, which is to say that they want the province to remain part of the United Kingdom. They say they will not sit down with Sinn Fein until their foes in the IRA have laid down their arms.

Not all the unionists are as extreme as the Rev. Ian Paisley, but he spoke for a lot of them after meeting Clinton at a university reception in Belfast last week.

“I will erect every barrier on the road to a united Ireland, but I’ll erect no barriers on the road to true peace,” he said.

At the same time, though, Paisley said he had tweaked the peace-seeking American President with a pointed question: “If I asked you to negotiate with the Oklahoma bombers, what would you say?”

The White House said that David Trimble, the head of the largest unionist party, and Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, were less hostile than Paisley to Clinton’s call for the politicians to catch up with the strong popular will for peace in Northern Ireland.

Adams, in particular, is feeling the pressure because he represents the most radical of minority Catholics seeking unification with the Irish Republic to the south. Having emerged as an international figure since first being granted a visa to the United States last year, he is now reacting cautiously to the push for peace.

“Patently, the IRA has made it clear that it is not going to surrender its weapons,” Adams said, while at the same time acknowledging a new dimension: “the unique situation of a [U.S.] President who is emotionally involved in this issue.”

Praised almost universally for his evenhandedness, Clinton says the United States will not take sides in the search for a settlement.

“It’s not for the United States to tell anybody how to solve specific problems, including decommissioning” of arms, he said before leaving Dublin.

Even before Clinton was airborne Saturday, though, Britain and Ireland were turning up the heat. On Friday, all political parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Fein, received letters from the two governments inviting them to participate in groundwork talks.

Major launched his own diplomatic initiative with a round of television interviews Friday night in which he reaffirmed the British position on arms.

“People who mean peace don’t need guns. . . . Now is the time for the Northern Ireland parties and their leaders to have the courage to step out of the bunkers,” Major said.

At the same time, though, he appeared to be cracking a door for Sinn Fein, saying that what is needed is a commitment to “a permanent and certain” end to violence.

The surrender of arms, Major said, is “a question of building up confidence. We have not seen an alternative way of building up that confidence. Unless one is produced, then I think it is going to be necessary for there to be some form of decommissioning. And no one has yet suggested an alternative.”

In Dublin, that is read as an invitation for Mitchell to find “an alternative,” semantic or otherwise, that will allow peace hopes to drive around the weapons boulder.

Buoyed by his reception in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic but mindful of the difficulties ahead, Clinton teased Mitchell at a farewell dinner in Dublin by saying that the situation reminded him of a country song: “I got the gold mine, and you got the shaft.”

Fair enough. But never in recent memory has the Northern Ireland shaft awaited a ray of light.