Sinn Fein Leader, Blair Hold Historic Meeting

In a historic, high-risk meeting for both men, Irish republican leader Gerry Adams went to Downing Street on Thursday to tell Prime Minister Tony Blair that Britain must leave Northern Ireland.

That’s not on the agenda, Blair said.

The encounter was the first since 1921 between a Sinn Fein leader and a prime minister at the heart of government, and it was powerfully symbolic: The Cabinet Room, where Thursday’s 80-minute meeting took place over handshakes and a spot of tea, was shaken by an Irish Republican Army mortar during a Cabinet meeting in 1991.

It was Adams who did most of the public talking Thursday. But it was Blair who arranged the encounter as a means of wrapping Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed IRA, ever more tightly within the democratic, nonviolent political process.

“We faced up to the difficulties. In many ways, the engagement could be described as a moment in history,” said Adams, flanked outside No. 10 Downing St. by six other Sinn Fein delegates and the Blair family’s public Christmas tree.

“We certainly had the opportunity to put our view that all the hurt and grief and division which has come from British involvement in our affairs has to end,” Adams said while pro- and anti-Sinn Fein demonstrators shouted across police lines nearby.

As Adams headed into the talks, he was intercepted by Rita Restorick, whose son Stephen was the last British soldier killed by the IRA before the cease-fire. She handed Adams a Christmas card and made a plea for peace.

The meeting between Blair and Adams, coming at a time when peace talks in divided Northern Ireland lack momentum, was called “constructive and positive” by the prime minister’s spokesman. Blair himself later repeated that the aim of the talks is peace, not the unification of Ireland.

Northern Ireland will remain British, Blair has said repeatedly, telling British reporters Thursday: “We can come to better arrangements than there are now . . . and make sure that people can live in some sort of security and stability.”

His spokesman said Blair sat across from Adams and told him, “It is important that I can look you in the eye and hear you say that you remain committed to peaceful means.”

Adams and Blair first met two months ago in Belfast, the Northern Ireland provincial capital. Adams since has begun to publicly acknowledge, as he did in an interview with The Times last week, that the current talks are just a steppingstone toward fulfilling Sinn Fein’s dream of a united Ireland.

This meeting occurred six years after the nonfatal mortar attack on the Cabinet, six months after two police officers were slain by the IRA while walking their beat in Northern Ireland, and six days after Adams, Martin McGuinness, his deputy, and Martin Ferris, another Sinn Fein participant Thursday, were identified by the BBC as senior leaders of the IRA. All three deny it.

Among leaders of majority Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain a British province--all of them outraged by Thursday’s meeting--there is a conviction that an IRA cease-fire in place since July is a ploy. Security sources in Belfast see no imminent breakdown of the cease-fire but are alarmed that the IRA has resumed surveillance of potential targets.

The unionist belief that Blair is giving undue credibility to Sinn Fein was reinforced Thursday after the escape of Liam Averell, an IRA member convicted of murder, in Northern Ireland. When asked about the escape, Adams said, “Good luck to him.” Police said Averell fled Maze Prison on Wednesday by disguising himself as a woman after a Christmas party for prisoners with their wives and children.

“Other countries don’t invite unreconstructed terrorists to the negotiating table,” said Ken Maginnis, spokesman for the Ulster Unionists, the largest Protestant party in Northern Ireland.

Talking with reporters, Sinn Fein’s McGuinness called for David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, to meet with Adams as the next step in the lagging process.

Retorted the Ulster Unionists’ Maginnis, “We won’t be meeting with any member of the IRA until such time as there is an expression of remorse.” The Ulster Unionists are attending the talks but have refused to speak directly with Sinn Fein. Smaller unionist parties, including one led by the Rev. Ian Paisley, refuse to enter the talks.

“The whole thing was an exercise of outrageous hypocrisy and deliberate lying,” said Paisley on Thursday. “Here we saw the godfathers of those who planned the bombing of Downing Street, standing outside there and piously pretending that they were engaged in a search for peace.”

Blair’s risk is that by dealing with Sinn Fein he may lose the unionists from the peace table. He wants a negotiated settlement by May, but without even an agenda in view now, his deadline seems improbable.

The British leader, though, believes that the peace process has advanced further than ever after nearly three decades of violence and more than 3,000 deaths, and that it would be tragic to allow it to lapse.

“If we were to slip back, I believe we would slip back to something worse than what came before,” Blair said Thursday.

The last Sinn Fein leader to walk into No. 10 Downing St. was Michael Collins, late of Hollywood fame. Prime Minister David Lloyd George avoided shaking hands and found him “an uneducated and rather stupid man.” Collins thought George to be “particularly obnoxious.”