IRA Bomb Triggers Renewed Search for Peace

If there was an area of common agreement in the wake of last week’s stunning Irish Republican Army bomb attack in London, it was that the parties involved cannot be bombed to the negotiating table.

But the explosion Friday that killed two, injured scores of others and caused an estimated $150 million damage has focused people’s minds, setting off an intensive search for ways to jump-start the long-stalled Northern Ireland peace process.

The expressions of outrage and disbelief in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy have been followed in recent days by a level of diplomatic activity and sense of purpose in the British and Irish governments rarely seen during the 17-month IRA cease-fire.

As a precautionary measure, British Prime Minister John Major on Wednesday ordered 500 more British troops to Northern Ireland to meet the heightened threat.

But the intensity of diplomatic activity, coupled with the lack of further IRA attacks, has rekindled hopes the London bomb may not have doomed the search for peace.

In London, Major on Monday delivered a lengthy statement on the crisis to Parliament and in a nationally televised address to the nation.

Instead of slamming the door on negotiations, Major seemed restrained and careful to make sure he left room to go forward.

“His comments were measured and positive,” an Irish government official said. “Our fear was a more strident response.”

Some observers even claim that they saw hints of a softening of Major’s controversial insistence that elections for a negotiating assembly in Northern Ireland precede talks: He referred to the idea as “one way forward” rather than “the only way forward.”

The idea of elections before talks raises old fears for Northern Ireland’s minority Irish nationalists, who are mainly Roman Catholics.

They have been steamrollered for decades in elected assemblies dominated by the majority unionists, mainly Protestant, striving to preserve the province’s union with Britain.

In Dublin, the Irish Parliament on Wednesday completed a tense, two-day debate on the peace process in which new proposals quickly dominated earlier recriminations leveled at Major, accusing him of being inflexible.

“The government will do everything possible to get the peace process back on track,” Prime Minister John Bruton said. “In particular, we will work closely with the British government to steer the process through this difficult stage.”

Preliminary work has already begun to prepare a Bruton-Major summit, most likely next week in London, at which the two leaders would chart a unified way forward.

“The goal is to map a strategy for launching a joint initiative that would then be put to the [unionist and nationalist] parties for approval,” an Irish government official said.

The official indicated that only the strategy, not the initiative itself, would probably be agreed upon at the summit. He added that the IRA would also have to approve the way forward and announce a new cease-fire.

Bruton and Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring have pushed the idea of proximity talks, similar to the Bosnian negotiations carried out in Dayton, Ohio, as a swift first step to get the negotiating process underway.

Such talks would deal mainly with procedural matters, such as searching for some acceptable compromise that might permit elections of negotiating teams.

For the British and Irish governments, television images of proximity talks would carry important symbolic value too, demonstrating to impatient electorates that the process had begun.

The Dublin government earlier this week eased a ban on contacts with the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, which it had imposed the day after the bombing. Dublin also offered Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams immediate exploratory meetings, albeit at civil-servant level only.

Sinn Fein spokeswoman Rita O’Hara said Wednesday that every major Irish political party had sought contacts during the previous three days.

One key reason for all this activity is the near-universal anger and disappointment in Northern Ireland following the bombing.

These emotions were directed against the IRA for resuming violence but also against Irish and British political leaders for failing to get talks started despite the passage of 1 1/2 years.

When a Northern Ireland television station Monday asked viewers whether they favored an immediate start of all-party negotiations (including Sinn Fein), the station got nearly 14,000 calls, two-thirds of them saying “yes.” The result indicated that support for this option extends well into the Protestant population.

In an attempt to confer further legitimacy on negotiations, moderate Northern Ireland nationalist leader John Hume has proposed a referendum in the Irish Republic and in the north on the same question.

In London and Dublin, government officials strenuously denied that the flurry of activity rewarded Sinn Fein, which had consistently complained about the lack of progress in starting talks, or the IRA, whose statement declaring an end to the cease-fire also cited the failure to begin negotiations.

“Sinn Fein will get no concessions because of what’s happened,” an Irish government official insisted. “If anything, it [the bombing] will make it harder for them.”