Rivals in Northern Ireland OK Plan for Government

Northern Ireland’s peace process crossed another important hurdle Tuesday when the province’s rival political parties approved the framework for a new Protestant-Catholic government.

Meeting in the provincial capital, Belfast, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly voted 77 to 29 to create a 12-member executive council, paving the way for the transfer of some powers from the British government next month.

But while celebrating the bipartisan victory, politicians on both sides of the sectarian divide warned that the province’s fragile Good Friday peace accord could still unravel in the coming weeks over the issue of Irish Republican Army disarmament.

The Assembly must decide who will make up the executive council, and Protestant leaders say they will not share power with the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, until the clandestine group disarms. Despite mounting pressure for at least a symbolic destruction of weapons, the IRA is refusing to budge.

Sinn Fein responds that the Protestants are trying to rewrite the peace agreement reached in April, which does not demand a weapons hand-over before the government is seated and functioning.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams met Tuesday in London but failed to resolve the dispute. Blair is scheduled to continue seeking a compromise today in a meeting with Protestant leader David Trimble, the designated first minister of Northern Ireland.

Tuesday’s vote clears the way for the British government to ask Northern Ireland’s political parties to nominate their candidates, but first Britain will try to break the deadlock over the IRA’s weapons.

The vote followed months of negotiations and two days of acrimonious debate in the 10-month-old Assembly, whose members include pro-accord Protestants and Roman Catholics--once blood rivals--and Protestants who still oppose the peace process.

All Catholic members of the Assembly and eight “neutral,” or nonsectarian, members voted for the government blueprint, but the Protestants were split down the middle.

A majority of Protestant support is generally regarded as key to the success of the agreement designed to end 30 years of warfare between Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain part of Britain and Catholics who want to be united with the Irish Republic.

Two members of Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party had threatened to vote against him and give a majority of Protestant votes to the “no” camp, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party.

“No unionist leader can survive when he hasn’t the majority of unionist representatives in the elected Assembly with him,” Paisley said hopefully before the vote.

But one of the wavering unionists changed his mind at the last moment, leaving Trimble with exactly half the 58 pro-British Protestant votes.

Afterward, a relieved Trimble told reporters that it now falls to the IRA to go beyond its July 1997 truce and begin destroying its weapons.

“The onus is now on paramilitaries, all of them, to act,” Trimble said. “And that must take place between now and the 10th of March. There is nothing more we can do to implement this agreement.”

Protestant parties linked to paramilitary groups did not win enough seats in the Assembly to demand a place on the executive council. Their militants also have not destroyed their weapons caches, believed to be far smaller than the IRA’s.

Sinn Fein leaders have said publicly that they cannot force the IRA to relinquish its hidden weaponry before the Catholic politicians take office, because that would be seen as a humiliating surrender by Catholic hard-liners.

“If the government sticks to the [Good Friday] agreement and the parties stick to the agreement, this issue can be resolved, just as all the other issues have been resolved,” Adams said after meeting with Blair.

He called on Trimble to stop raising the demand for IRA disarmament “as an obstacle to progress, rather than what it should be--a goal of the process.”

The accord calls for all Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups to disarm by May 2000 after a local government is up and running along with cross-border commissions to coordinate policies in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and Britain.

But even Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has been increasing the pressure on the IRA to make a move, calling on both sides to compromise.

“The political reality is that we cannot get to the position of setting up an executive, which we desperately need to do . . . without finding a compromise,” Ahern said. “I have always said that [disarmament] has to happen. There can be no place for weapons in a democratic and peaceful Ireland.”

The government framework approved Tuesday establishes 10 departments, or ministries, six cross-border bodies, a British-Irish council and a consultative civic forum. The 10 ministers will sit on the executive council with Trimble and Catholic Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon.

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Special correspondent Martina Purdy in Belfast contributed to this report.