N. Ireland Peace Talks Race Against the Clock

Protestants and Catholics, Irish and British met virtually nonstop Wednesday as the final hours ticked away before the deadline for a peace deal in Northern Ireland.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, took a direct hand in the negotiations.

Ahern spent the day flying back and forth from here to Dublin, where he attended the burial of his 87-year-old mother.

The talks in Belfast, designed to end three decades of sectarian violence and bloodshed in this British province, were unexpectedly stalled Tuesday when the largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, flatly rejected a draft settlement drawn up by the chairman of the negotiations, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell.

His 65-page proposal, the Ulster Unionists complained in a toughly worded statement, includes suggestions tantamount to “embryonic all-Ireland government.”

On a dreary Irish spring day laced with cold rain and sleet, Blair and Ahern met for an hour at Hillsborough Castle, southwest of Belfast, the provincial capital. The two leaders then conferred separately with negotiators from Northern Ireland’s political parties.

At the end of the day, both British and Irish officials, as well as some local politicians, were voicing guarded optimism that a settlement could be forged by the deadline set by Mitchell of midnight tonight.

“I don’t deny there are differences, some of them considerable, but there is a real sense that people have come this far and they can’t go back,” Blair’s spokesman said. “No doubt in substance they are just about there. With luck, with a bit more courage and with continuing goodwill, it can be done.”

Irish Foreign Minister David Andrews said, “I would like to think that by tomorrow night we will have a good message for the people of the island of Ireland.”

The biggest stumbling blocks to an accord involve the proposed creation of a Northern Ireland assembly to replace the old Protestant-dominated Parliament at Stormont Castle, dissolved in 1972, and of a council for intergovernmental cooperation between the province and the Irish Republic.

Details of the Mitchell plan have not been made public. But news reports say the ministerial council would be formed by a vote in the British and Irish parliaments and would control administrative machinery for cooperation in the north and south of Ireland in areas such as agriculture, tourism and transport.

The Ulster Unionists--the largest party among Northern Ireland’s 54% Protestant majority, as well as the biggest party overall--want any cross-border cooperation to be firmly under control of the new provincial parliament, where they and other Protestant parties presumably would hold a majority.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein--the political arm of the Irish Republican Army that advocates Northern Ireland’s reunification with the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic south--and a more moderate Catholic party, the Ulster Social Democratic and Labor Party, have demanded an independent and powerful cross-border council as their payoff for taking part in the new northern assembly.

“This generation of Irish Republicans will not be faced down by the British government on the core issues,” Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said Wednesday.

He accused the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, of “carefully staged tantrums and rehearsed walkouts” and urged Blair to “settle Mr. Trimble down and bring him face to face with his responsibilities.”

For Blair, Ahern and Mitchell, who has presided over the Belfast talks since they began in June 1996, the trick by midnight tonight will be finding a package that both Trimble and Adams can endorse and that would be approved by voters on both sides of the Irish border in a referendum planned for May 22.

Speaking to the press after eight hours of negotiations at Stormont, nerve center of the Northern Ireland government outside Belfast, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, acknowledged that the gap was still wide between major Protestant and Catholic parties. But she said it was steadily closing.

“You shouldn’t underestimate the determination of the parties in there to find an accommodation,” Mowlam said, predicting that negotiations would go “down to the wire.”

Meanwhile, another sectarian-related slaying--more than 3,200 have occurred in the past three decades--served as a grisly reminder to the politicians huddled at Stormont of what might lie ahead if they fail to reach agreement.

Early Wednesday, a small anti-British gang called the Irish National Liberation Army fatally shot a Protestant as his wife parked their car in front of their Londonderry home. The victim, Trevor Deeney, 34, was a paroled member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, an outlawed pro-British paramilitary group. Police made several arrests.