N. Ireland Cabinet Holds First Meeting

On a day of historic firsts and defining moments, Irish Republican Army supporters sat down with their Protestant antagonists on Thursday in a new Northern Ireland government.

That first meeting produced no decisions but encouraged great hopes that three decades of bloodshed may truly be at an end.

Also Thursday, the IRA confirmed that it had appointed a senior member to meet soon with a Belfast-based disarmament commission. It did not name the appointee.

“I welcome the IRA’s announcement. It shows that on Day One the IRA have kept their word, and that augurs well for decommissioning [of weapons],” said Peter Mandelson, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary.

“It seems we are at the end of a terrible era of violence and suffering and at the beginning of a new era of life here,” said Seamus Mallon, the Roman Catholic deputy first minister in the new government.

“It is now possible to believe the day of the gun and the bomb are in fact over,” President Clinton said in Seattle. It was Clinton’s envoy, former Sen. George J. Mitchell, who prodded the parties to reach a compromise.

Earlier in Dublin, the Irish Republic amended its 1937 constitution to drop its territorial claim to the British province. Britain and Ireland also signed treaties to create all-Ireland and British-Irish institutions envisaged in the 1998 Good Friday accord.

“As we look into a new millennium, the people of Ireland and Britain are redefining their relationships as partners and equals,” said Irish President Mary McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic.

In Belfast, 10 Protestant and Catholic ministers of the new power-sharing Cabinet sat down to discuss how their unique coalition would work. The Democratic Unionists’ two Cabinet ministers boycotted the meeting to protest Sinn Fein’s involvement.

First Minister David Trimble said his Ulster Unionist Party was eager to govern alongside its three unlikely partners: the moderate Catholics of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, the IRA-linked Sinn Fein and the hard-line Protestants of the Democratic Unionist Party.

Britain, which ended 27 years of “direct rule” in the province at midnight Wednesday, retains control over foreign affairs, taxes, policing and criminal justice.