For N. Ireland Peace Pact, the Devil Is in the Details

Paddy McElhinney, 28, wants to believe that peace is at hand for him, his wife, Anne, and their four children. But then the strapping taxi driver is dubious as he recalls that awful Halloween five years ago at the Rising Sun pub.

As he sipped a soda and was about to return to his shift in nearby Londonderry, two gunmen burst into the lounge. A third man with a double-barreled shotgun stood watch. One invader yelled “Trick or treat!” and he and his partner sprayed at least 45 rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle and Browning automatic pistol. Eight men and women were killed. McElhinney and 30 others in an adjoining barroom fled into the restrooms and survived.

Now, if the newly reached peace accord for Northern Ireland advances, 440 criminals, including gunmen and bombers serving life terms for multiple murders of unarmed civilians, could be out on the streets again by June 2000. Among them could be the four sentenced to life in 1995 for the “trick or treat” massacre. “If they let these people out, they’re going to do it again,” McElhinney said. “At the end of the day, they killed innocent people.”

Already, fine print in the 67-page peace proposal is whipping up controversy, especially on the hot-button issues known as the “Three Ps”--prisoners, policing and parades.

There also is the “D-word,” potentially the biggest problem in an accord, which, if implemented, will touch the daily lives of people in Northern Ireland. Unless “decommissioning,” or the voluntary surrender, of weapons by Irish republicans and pro-British loyalist paramilitaries begins in June, as the agreement requires, this deal--which includes Protestant-Roman Catholic power-sharing in a new provincial assembly and formal government cooperation with the Irish Republic--will probably fall through.

“Decommissioning--that’s the real thorn,” said Ian Taylor, Conservative member of the British Parliament and his party’s former spokesman on Northern Ireland.

If voters in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic endorse the peace plan in referendums scheduled for May 22, the Irish Republican Army and its pro-British Protestant enemies are to relinquish their entire arsenals in two years.

But already the IRA, which has its own reservations about the accord, seems to be sending signals that it is unhappy with that timetable. John Hume--a moderate Catholic and member of the British Parliament from Londonderry who is widely credited with drawing Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, into peace talks--said Monday that the underground group may not be ready to relinquish arms. “You are into a psychological matter in Northern Ireland in terms of being seen to surrender to the other side,” said Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party.

London Newspapers Carry Mug Shots

In worrying about the people whom the settlement may put back on the street, McElhinney has plenty of company. London newspapers have been carrying mug shots and thumbnail biographies of Catholic and Protestant paramilitary members likely to be released if the settlement, nearly two years in the negotiating, goes through.

For former Conservative Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, whose wife was paralyzed in an October 1984 bombing by an IRA commando who had targeted Britain’s then-prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her Cabinet, the early release plan is nothing but “victory for the IRA.”

Patrick Magee, 47, the IRA master bomber responsible for that devastating attack, which tore the facade off the Grand Hotel in Brighton, killing five people and injuring many others, would probably qualify for early release if voters approve the peace plan and the IRA’s 9-month-old cease-fire holds.

Although the agreement--reached Friday by eight of this province’s political parties and the British and Irish governments--states that the “seriousness” of a prisoner’s offense and the “need to protect the community” will be taken into account, British sources have predicted that all prisoners would be freed within two years.

That would free, among others:

* Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair, 33, a commander of the Ulster Freedom Force who is believed to have organized the killing of as many as 40 nationalists.

* IRA guerrilla Peter Sherry, 42, who is thought to have killed up to 20 British police officers and soldiers.

* Gerald McDonnell, 48, cousin of Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein. McDonnell was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1986 for involvement in a plot to bomb English seaside resorts.

* Gilbert McNamee, 37, the IRA bomb maker and electronics wizard who crafted the nail bomb that killed four Life Guards and seven of their horses in London’s Hyde Park in 1982.

Idea of Inmates Being Freed Is Opposed

The idea that those who caused such harm and loss will be freed as part of a peace deal--as well as being offered help to find a job or training to get one--outrages families of some victims and clearly has given some people here second thoughts.

“If you take somebody’s life, why should you come out and walk the streets when somebody is grieving for their father or brother?” asked April Morrison, whose brother, sister and niece all died in the 1993 IRA bombing of a fish market on Shankill Road in a Protestant quarter of Belfast, the provincial capital.

Kenneth Bloomfield, head of a commission that assists victims of the Northern Ireland violence, in which more than 3,200 people have lost their lives and 30,000 suffered injuries, is asking people to look at the big picture.

“The idea of people getting out early is hurtful to a lot of individuals who have suffered terribly,” he said. “But that has got to be weighed against the greater good of drawing some sort of line under this whole situation.”

But even the police have broken their bureaucratic reserve to object to these clauses of the peace deal.

In Northern Ireland, 301 officers have been killed and 7,500 wounded in three decades. In the neighboring Irish Republic, as many as eight republicans are serving 40-year prison sentences for killing members of the Garda Siochana. “Anybody who murders a policeman in the course of his duty should serve his full term. It is an attack on the state itself,” Michael Kirby of the Irish Police Assn. said Wednesday.

However, in neighborhoods such as Londonderry’s Bogside--working-class, overwhelmingly Catholic and resolutely anti-British--it is Northern Ireland’s police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who are seen as a fundamental part of the problem.

Over a cup of tea, Mary Honeyford, 75, a retired garment worker, related to a recent visitor how her late husband, William, a laborer, was beaten so badly after being picked up for interrogation that he had to be hospitalized.

Her two daughters, Rosalie, 37, a shop clerk, and Anne, 43, a machinist who makes shirts, poured out their own litany of complaints: how the police in the 1970s tried to break into their house at 5 or 6 in the morning, supposedly to search for weapons; how, another time, officers allegedly beat two of their friends to death.

Views on Officers of Constabulary Force

One routinely hears a wholly different view of the force’s 8,400 active-duty officers and 4,300 reservists--about 90% of whom are Protestant--from politicians on the other side of Northern Ireland’s secular divide.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, an Irish historian whose study of pro-British unionist politics in Northern Ireland is due out this summer, called them “the best police force in the British Isles.” She contended that the force has been so heavily Protestant because Catholics who joined were earmarked for liquidation by Irish republicans.

Last week, the pro-British Ulster Unionist Party claimed at the peace negotiations to have “saved” the constabulary, in existence since 1922. But much will have to change for those who wear its bottle-green uniforms to enjoy the support of the 43% Catholic minority.

Under the peace plan, the British government has committed itself to creating a commission to recommend sweeping reforms by no later than summer 1999.

In the Bogside, this will be a litmus test of whether the peace plan changes people’s lives. At the moment, residents avoid reporting crimes to the police and shun neighbors who have any dealings with them. “The RUC can’t come back here and patrol the way the police could in an English town,” Anne Honeyford said. “If they come on the Bogside, it’s bricks and such for them.”

Finally, there are the parades, a means of communal self-affirmation in Northern Ireland but also proof of the divisions among its 1.6 million people and flash points for violence in the past.

On Easter Sunday, Catholics who dream of the province being subsumed into the Irish Republic marched in Belfast and elsewhere to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Dublin uprising against British rule.

The next day, it was the turn of Protestant groups, known as Apprentice Boys, to commemorate the bravery of 13 apprentices who in 1688 shut the gates of Londonderry to block entry of a Catholic regiment.

For Alistair Graham, 55, a Yorkshireman who chairs a new seven-member commission that is supposed to decide whether parade routes are too provocative, the “nightmare scenario” would be for Protestants who oppose the peace agreement to use the marches as bully pulpits.

First Test of Parade Season Is Encouraging

The first test of the season, a march Monday by a small group of Apprentice Boys in Belfast, came off peacefully when participants reluctantly obeyed the commission’s ruling and did not enter the mostly Catholic Lower Ormeau Road neighborhood.

Graham called it an “excellent start.” But participants then boarded a bus for Ballymena in the Protestant heartland, where more than 60 Protestant fife-and-drum bands marched through the streets, and youngsters sipping from tall cans of beer sang obscene songs about the Virgin Mary.

“At the moment, I do not see much sign yet of people coming together,” Ronnie Flanagan, chief of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, said.

And, indeed, on Wednesday, the campaign against the peace agreement got off to a noisy start, with the Rev. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, a small but influential hard-line Protestant party, asserting that the accord would lead to the British-ruled province being merged with the Irish Republic.

Meantime, directors of the Orange Order--Ireland’s largest Protestant fraternal organization, which has deep roots in the unionist community and had been expected to embrace the peace agreement--announced that they could not recommend a “yes” vote. While the lodge did not actually oppose the plan, it declined to recommend any direction to voters until certain provisions, especially on the issues of policing and the release of prisoners, have been “clarified.”