Irish Rebel Group Admits Errors, Joins Cease-Fire

Yet another Irish republican group declared a cease-fire Saturday amid a wave of revulsion across northern and southern Ireland against a car bomb that killed 28 people here a week ago.

The Irish National Liberation Army, a particularly violent group, proclaimed that “armed struggle can never be the only option for revolutionaries.”

Silence fell on this grieving community, where more than 20,000 Protestants and Catholics packed the town center Saturday to remember, through their sobs and tears, those killed in the Aug. 15 bombing.

Hundreds of thousands more marked the slaughter--the worst in three decades of violence in Northern Ireland--with one minute of silence in town squares, churches, sports stadiums and shopping centers across Ireland.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office said he will visit the province on Tuesday to express his belief that the Omagh bomb had brought the people of Northern Ireland closer together.

At the ceremony outside the Omagh courthouse, leaders of the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches in Ireland stood shoulder to shoulder. To one side, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, reputed former IRA commanders and today leaders of the Sinn Fein party; to the other, the Protestant and Catholic heads of Northern Ireland’s newborn cross-community government, David Trimble and Seamus Mallon.

Beyond them a sea of people, some wearing bandages and casts from the blast, wiped back tears as the names of the 28 dead were slowly read.

“At this hour last Saturday, 28 good and deeply loved people, one carrying twins awaiting birth, were alive in these streets,” said Father Kevin Mullan, recalling the moments when police evacuated people from the courthouse area--and unwittingly toward the bomb.

“Death and life were blasted together. Death carried life and peace away,” Mullan said.

A Presbyterian minister said a prayer in Gaelic, the old Irish tongue normally loathed by the north’s Protestants. A local Catholic chaplain at Omagh’s British army base said another prayer in Spanish, in recognition of a Spanish teacher and student killed in the bombing.

On Saturday morning, the Irish National Liberation Army admitted mistakes and pledged a cease-fire.

The so-called Real IRA, a group of Irish Republican Army dissidents that claimed responsibility for the Omagh attack, said Wednesday that it had “suspended” its violent campaign.

The INLA, founded in 1975 and an opponent of April’s peace accord, said Saturday that it will respect the deal because the majority of Irish people had ratified it.

“We recognize that armed struggle can never be the only option for revolutionaries,” said the statement, read at a Belfast news conference by the group’s reputed commander, Willie Gallagher.

The statement offered what it called “a sincere, heartfelt and genuine apology” for the innocent people it had killed. But the group said it had “nothing to apologize for” in its killing of British soldiers, police and Protestant militants.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who attended Saturday’s ceremony in Omagh, said the INLA truce was “good news at the end of a bleak and tragic week.”

The INLA has killed about 130 people since its founding.