Protestant Leader Launches Bid to Win OK for Compromise With IRA

Taking one of the biggest gambles of his political career, Northern Ireland’s top Protestant leader launched a campaign Friday to win his party’s backing for a compromise deal to implement the stalled Good Friday peace accord.

Ulster Unionist Party chief David Trimble said his party council will vote Nov. 27 on whether to abandon its “no guns, no government” policy and accept the plan thrashed out with U.S. diplomat George J. Mitchell to set up a power-sharing executive body with the political wing of the Irish Republican Army before the guerrilla group begins to disarm.

“There is a mood in the country which realizes that this is the time to break the stalemate, this is the time to get things going,” Trimble said. “I am quite sure this party will, as it has in the past, rise to the challenge.”

But in an indication of the tough job ahead in the coming week, Trimble’s news conference at party headquarters was interrupted by dissenters in his own house.

“The package on offer from the IRA is inadequate,” said Jeffrey Donaldson, a member of the British Parliament for the Ulster Unionists, who favor continued alliance with Britain. He said there is no guarantee that the IRA will ever get rid of its guns.

Six of the 10 unionists in Parliament have signed a letter rejecting the compromise. At least half of the 14 UUP party officers expressed their “total opposition” to the deal at a meeting Friday, according to one of the lawmakers, Jim Rogers. And Trimble’s own deputy, John Taylor, is among the skeptics.

Trimble is betting that he will win the support of the 850-member council, which approved his decision to sign the April 1998 agreement to end a 30-year conflict and share power with the province’s Roman Catholics by a 72% vote.

But the party council has been unpredictable in the past, and opinion polls give conflicting indications.

A Sunday Times survey at the party’s annual conference last month found that 61% of the delegates were opposed to the kind of deal now on the table.

At the same time, 65% said Trimble is the best leader for the party. A rejection of the deal would almost certainly bring down Trimble along with the Good Friday accord.

Political observers estimate that about a third of the council is for the compromise, a third against and a third undecided. Two-thirds of the council must support the deal for it to pass.

That means that the future of the peace accord is in effect in the hands of a few hundred party activists such as Jim McDowell, a UUP leader from East Belfast who has long supported the agreement but is wavering over the compromise.

McDowell is looking to Trimble to lay out a fallback position if the IRA refuses to disarm.

“I would have to have a fairly cast-iron guarantee that if they don’t disarm, the two governments [Britain and Ireland] and President Clinton will say there will be sanctions against Sinn Fein [the IRA’s political ally], probably their suspension from the executive,” McDowell said.

The council is made up of a variety of unionists, including 120 representatives of the conservative Orange Order fraternity, 34 members of the Ulster Unionist Women’s Council, 34 members of the Young Unionists’ Council and 27 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly established by the peace accord.

As leader of Northern Ireland’s largest party, Trimble would head a new government. After days of pressures, promises and negotiations with the British and Irish prime ministers in July, he refused to form an executive with Sinn Fein that could assume powers from London before IRA guns were “decommissioned.”

Mitchell, who brokered the Good Friday accord, was brought back in September to try to save it. He forced the two sides to get to know each other in intensive face-to-face negotiations such as they had not held before, and nearly 11 weeks later he announced the deal.

Under the compromise, paramilitary groups would appoint representatives to an independent disarmament commission on the day the executive body is empowered and meets for the first time.

That could take place as early as Nov. 29 if the Ulster Unionists vote for the deal.

The Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups are to work out the logistics of disarmament, which is to be completed by May, according to the accord.

Ken Maginnis, a UUP member of Parliament, will be one of those leading the campaign for approval of the deal, which he says may present a political risk but is “morally right.”

A supporter of the peace agreement and close associate of Trimble, Maginnis nonetheless took a few days before jumping on board himself. He decided that it was better than the offer on the table in July.

“This is the Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein looking at the whites of each other’s eyes and committing directly to each other under the aegis of Mitchell, not something two governments tried to concoct and that neither of us understood,” Maginnis said.

But what will he say when his constituents argue that it does not lock the IRA into disarmament?

“I’ll say, ‘You got me on that one.’ I’m unhappy with it, and that’s why I pondered it, why I had to swallow hard,” Maginnis said. “My biggest fear, and history tells me, [is that] this is a con game by Sinn Fein and the IRA.

“But knowing that, I nonetheless put pressure on them and allow them down the route they are currently traveling. If they scurry backward, where does that put them nationally and internationally?”

Maginnis said he felt a duty to future generations to give the deal a try and predicted that the party council will agree with him and Trimble.

“Common sense always prevails,” he said.