2 More Slain in N. Ireland; Sinn Fein Leaders Meet With Britain’s Blair

Assassins claimed a Protestant shopkeeper and a Roman Catholic taxi driver as the latest victims of sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland on Monday, while the limping quest for peace between Catholics and Protestants survived a confrontation between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and dissatisfied leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

The United States, meanwhile, was drawn into controversy over Northern Ireland when Raymond Seitz, a former U.S. ambassador to London, accused Jean Kennedy Smith, now the American envoy to the Irish Republic and sister of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), of being “an ardent apologist for the IRA.”

Jim Guiney, 38, a father of four with links to a right-wing Protestant political party, went to work as usual Monday morning in his carpet store in Belfast, the provincial capital. He was dead before noon, killed by two extremists from the Irish National Liberation Army, a Catholic republican splinter group that began an accelerating spiral of violence during the Christmas holidays.

On Monday night, two gunmen fatally shot Larry Brennan, a 52-year-old Catholic taxi driver in Belfast, in what police said was an obvious retaliatory attack by Protestant terrorists for the killing of Guiney. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

The sectarian slayings, the sixth and seventh since Dec. 27 in the divided province, were counterpoint to demands for a better political deal made by Sinn Fein leaders who marched into Downing Street on Monday to complain about an Anglo-Irish document presented last week as the outline for a peace settlement.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said he told Blair that the outline was skewered to favor Protestants who seek continued rule of the province by Britain.

“We want to see an end to all killing,” Adams said. “The way to bring that about is through honest dialogue on an inclusive basis.”

Ireland and Britain have proposed an elected assembly in Belfast and an intergovernmental body including Ireland, Britain, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Both are rejected by Sinn Fein, which seeks union of the province with the Irish Republic.

“Anyone who thinks an internal settlement is going to work, or some assembly with a few nationalist knobs stuck on to it is going to work, is not living in the real world,” Adams told reporters. Any solution, he said, must include “an all-Ireland dimension.”

Although analysts on both sides use “grave” to describe the state of negotiations, Adams said Sinn Fein will continue talking.

London and Dublin drew up the outline of an eventual settlement last week after four months of talks in Belfast failed even to produce an agenda. The talks under former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell move to London next week.

Their future is clouded, though, by the violence of maverick Protestant and Catholic groups that attack any prospect of peace with terror. On Dec. 27, convicted Irish National Liberation Army extremists killed Billy Wright, the imprisoned leader of a Protestant extremist group called the Loyalist Volunteer Force.

Since then, Wright’s supporters have killed four Catholics. The last of them, Fergal McCusker, 28, was shot as he walked home “a bit drunk” early Sunday in the town of Maghera near Londonderry.

The Northern Ireland tensions have been exacerbated by the Telegraph of London’s serial “Over Here,” Seitz’s account of his ambassadorship in London until 1994. He says that, at one point under former Prime Minister John Major, Britain stopped supplying intelligence about Northern Ireland to the United States “because it often seemed to find its way to the IRA.”

In Dublin, Seitz writes, Kennedy Smith, “who distrusted her own staff and penalized them for their dissent, became promotion agent for Adams. Too shallow to understand the past and too naive to anticipate the future, she was an ardent IRA apologist.”

Seitz declines to elaborate. Kennedy Smith has no comment; neither has the British Foreign Office.