Car Bomb in N. Ireland Hits Peace Process as Well as Rural Town

A powerful car bomb massively damaged the heart of a country village in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, and the aftershocks dealt a blow to wheezing peace talks here.

The main Protestant political party, itself boycotting the talks, immediately demanded that Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, be expelled from the negotiations.

The IRA, whose continued cease-fire is essential for Sinn Fein’s presence at the talks, denied responsibility for the attack. Suspicion fell on a hard-line IRA splinter group.

A parked blue van exploded just after noon on market day in Markethill, about 30 miles southwest of Belfast, where the local five-man police force, alerted by a phoned warning, was desperately evacuating primary school students, shoppers, cattle traders and residents from the town center.

Edward Graham, a senior police officer, called it a “miracle” that there were no serious injuries in the blast by an estimated 400 pounds of explosives not far from the border with the Irish Republic. Veterinarians said up to 400 cattle awaiting sale at the market might have to be destroyed.

In the aftermath, Markethill’s damaged police station, the cattle market, shops, homes and parked cars were as vacant as short-term prospects for the latest attempt to forge a political settlement to end decades of sectarian bloodshed in this British province.

Also wrecked was the prospect that the Ulster Unionists, the largest political party among the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, would rejoin the talks, which they left when Sinn Fein arrived Monday.

Party leader David Trimble has said the British loyalists want to remain in the talks, but he has sought additional guarantees from sponsors Britain and Ireland and American talks chairman George Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader.

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Trimble and party leaders quietly agreed Tuesday morning that a mid-level delegation would go to the talks site in the afternoon, although they would not sit in the same room with Sinn Fein and four moderate parties.

Then came word of the bomb, and the plan was scrapped. Trimble went instead to Markethill, saying there was an “overwhelming chance of IRA involvement” in the attack.

Later, party leaders harangued Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Britain’s Cabinet secretary for Northern Ireland, demanding that Sinn Fein be expelled because of the attack as well as for the IRA’s reservations, expressed last week, about democratic commitments accepted by Sinn Fein.

Mowlam, who denounced the Markethill bombing as an attempt to derail the talks, met urgently Tuesday night with Trimble; Trimble said he complained to her about Sinn Fein’s presence at the negotiations.

“It’s now a matter for the chairman and the secretary of state to answer the question ‘What happens to Sinn Fein now that this [the bombing] has happened?’ ” Trimble said.

In a damage-control statement of his own, Mitchell condemned the attack: “It is obviously an effort to blow up not just a police station but also the talks process. It cannot be permitted to succeed.”

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams expressed “regret” at the bombing. Gerry Kelly, one of his deputies at the talks, who was imprisoned in the 1970s as an IRA bomber, said: “We’re here as an electoral party. We had nothing to do with it.”

The warning call to police did not identify the organization calling or use a code word to authenticate the call. Both failures were exceptions to standard IRA practice. The IRA call disavowing the attack to a news organization in the Irish capital, Dublin, was prefaced with a code word.

Among security analysts, suspicion for the attack fell on a shadowy terror group that calls itself the Continuity Army Council, or Continuity IRA. Selectively active in bombings over the past two years, it is described as the armed wing of a hard-line, no-talks group that broke from Sinn Fein several years ago and has never associated itself with a cease-fire.

The council blew up a country hotel last year and was believed responsible for the thwarted attempt to destroy another one this year. It is described as small by security specialists and is thought to draw its support from areas immediately south of the Irish border.

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A second violent splinter group, the Marxist Irish National Liberation Army, is not thought to currently have bomb-making technology.

In security circles here, there is suspicion that IRA activists disgruntled with the cease-fire may be working with the Continuity Army Council.

Protestant political leaders accuse the IRA of, in effect, licensing attacks by the council to keep up military pressure without technically violating the cease-fire the IRA proclaimed July 19.

Britain, Ireland and the U.S. all consider Sinn Fein and the IRA two faces of the same coin and say they must pursue identical policies.

The talks will recess after today’s session until Monday. Participants are scheduled to meet Monday through Wednesday of each week, with a May 1998 deadline for an agreement.

The British and Irish governments envision a provincial assembly approved by a plebiscite in which the majority Protestants and the minority Roman Catholics would share power.

The proposed arrangements go too far for Protestants, who want the province to remain British. And they fall miles short of the dreams of the mostly Catholic nationalists, who want a union of the province with the Irish Republic.