N. Ireland Talks Adjourn; Parties Don’t Bend on Positions

The two parties long at loggerheads over Northern Ireland’s peace accord stressed Saturday that they understood each other’s positions--but weren’t yet prepared to shift their own to break the deadlock.

Conciliatory comments from the Irish Catholics of Sinn Fein and the pro-British Protestants of the Ulster Unionists have been the only product so far after nearly eight weeks of negotiations led by George J. Mitchell, the former U.S. Senate majority leader who helped achieve the Good Friday accord of 1998.

The talks adjourned late Saturday, and Mitchell said the parties would meet again Monday.

Mitchell, who had returned with reluctance to Northern Ireland at the request of the British and Irish governments, had promised a short and sharply focused review of why local parties haven’t enacted key planks of the moribund accord.

For more than a year the Ulster Unionists, Northern Ireland’s biggest party, have demanded that the outlawed Irish Republican Army start to disarm before they will accept Sinn Fein’s right to join in a new Protestant-Catholic government.

The Good Friday accord envisioned that the Ulster Unionists would have four posts and Sinn Fein two in a 12-member, four-party Cabinet for Northern Ireland. Negotiators and political analysts had expected Mitchell to make public his recommendations for breaking the deadlock by the end of October, but that prospect receded as darkness fell on a gloomy, gusting Halloween eve.

Mitchell has succeeded in getting Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, and the Ulster Unionists closer than they have ever been before, mediating between them in dozens of meetings. The Ulster Unionists had refused to talk directly to Sinn Fein during the negotiations that produced the Good Friday deal.

Ulster Unionist negotiator Reg Empey, emerging briefly from the negotiations, emphasized that his party must gain a commitment from the IRA to disarm, even though such a move might provoke dangerous splits within the ranks of the Sinn Fein-IRA movement.

But Sinn Fein says it can make no binding commitments on behalf of the IRA.