Britain, Ireland Offer ‘Road Map’ to Ulster Peace

Seeking to break a perilous deadlock in Northern Ireland peace talks, Britain and Ireland on Monday proposed something-for-everybody power-sharing to reconcile divided Protestants and Roman Catholics in the embattled province.

The initiative gives focus and the first real sense of movement to the talks since they opened in the fall. There is still a long road ahead, but along it the chance for a breakthrough for the first time.

“This is a very good day. We have produced a road map to a new agreement,” said Irish Foreign Minister David Andrews.

Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, the British Cabinet member responsible for Northern Ireland, observed: “It’s our best judgment of what might be the main elements of an overall settlement. I believe it to be fair and balanced.”

Initial reaction from the eight political parties in the talks was positive but cautious. Mowlam and Andrews said all parties would find points to agree and differ on. But Andrews said the drafters sought “a parity of comfort and discomfort.”

“The status of this document is to kick-start the process,” said Mowlam. Parties will be free to add, delete or modify the government outline, she said. “These proposals are not set in stone.”

Calling their propositions “a basis for discussion,” the two governments have in effect lighted the end of a long tunnel into whose darkness mutually suspicious Protestant and Catholic leaders have so far refused to venture.

Among the proposals presented Monday as the talks resumed after a year-end recess was one that will please the Protestant majority by offering home rule to Northern Ireland under an assembly elected by proportional representation.

Besides a restored legislature, Northern Ireland would recover executive authority for its own affairs--a power that now resides in London under Mowlam. An assembly has been tried and failed before and is distrusted among Catholic republicans, who want the province to become part of the Irish Republic.

The proposals, deliberately not presented in detail, include the creation of an intergovernmental council that would embrace representatives of the British and Irish governments, the new Northern Ireland government and home-rule governments being created in Scotland and Wales. The council’s responsibility and authority are not spelled out.

A north-south council of ministers would bring together government executives from Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic working in the same areas--tourism, agriculture, transport and industry, for example.

Common all-Ireland policies could be derived with the consent of the legislatures in north and south. Cross-border cooperation is embraced by Catholics who want closer links with Ireland and spurned by Protestants who reject any weakening of ties with Britain.

Other key issues certain to arouse bitter debate will be the fate of terrorist prisoners, the future policing of Northern Ireland and the decommissioning of weapons in the hands of Protestant terrorists and the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

Amid constitutional changes by Britain to accommodate to the new system, Ireland would abandon the formal demand in its constitution for the return of the six-county province separated from the rest of Ireland when the 26-county south became independent in the 1920s.

In maneuvering parties to the talks and ensuring a place in them for the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, for the first time last fall after an IRA cease-fire, Britain and Ireland said repeatedly that specifics of the final outcome of the talks would be up to the negotiators. They were expected to identify key areas and to work for agreement on them.

George J. Mitchell, the American chairman of the talks, conducted the opening round of discussions like a labor negotiator. Each side was allowed to state its position, with the idea that there then could be a basic agenda on which points existed. It didn’t happen. No agenda, or any prospect of one, had emerged when the talks adjourned Dec. 15.

In recent weeks, splinter Catholic and Protestant terrorists have resumed political killings, stretching ever thinner support for the talks by the outlawed Catholic IRA and Protestant paramilitary groups whose representatives are attending the talks.