Britain Threatens to Take Over in N. Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process unraveled further Thursday as the British government announced that it would resume direct rule over the province within days unless the Irish Republican Army took steps to disarm.

Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson told the British House of Commons that he will introduce legislation today to suspend Belfast’s 2-month-old government and transfer power back to London.

Trying to buy time for eleventh-hour negotiations, Mandelson said that it would take several days to implement the legislation and that the process could be halted immediately if the IRA were to budge.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, for about two hours late Thursday hoping that Ahern might have some advances to report after daylong talks with the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. But afterward, the two leaders acknowledged that their efforts had fallen short so far.

A sudden change of heart by the IRA seemed improbable. Sinn Fein leaders angrily accused the British government and David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s first minister, of violating the 1998 Good Friday agreement.

“If the institutions are suspended, it’s the greatest disaster to befall Ireland in the last 100 years, and I hope that doesn’t happen,” Sinn Fein negotiator Martin McGuinness told reporters in Belfast, the provincial capital.

McGuinness is education minister in the Protestant-Roman Catholic government of Northern Ireland that was formed in December after 27 years of direct British rule and a three-decade-long sectarian war between pro-British Protestants and Catholic nationalists who want the province united with the Irish Republic.

Britain’s move to retake power from Belfast was the gravest setback yet in the peace process, although it was intended to stave off what the British government considers to be an even worse outcome: Trimble’s resignation.

Trimble heads the Ulster Unionist Party and has been the most outspoken Protestant leader in support of the peace agreement. But he only won his party’s backing in November to enter a power-sharing government with Sinn Fein by promising to quit the Cabinet if IRA guns did not begin to be laid on the table by February. He gave party leaders a postdated resignation letter.

The British government fears that if Trimble resigns as first minister, he might not be able to regain the position and the peace process would collapse permanently.

On Monday, a commission set up under the peace accord issued a report to the British and Irish governments stating that paramilitaries had not begun to turn over, or “decommission,” weapons.

Mandelson delivered the commission’s message to a grim House of Commons, whose Labor and Conservative members refrained from their usual political sparring to present a united front.

“This is totally unacceptable. Notably in the case of the IRA, it has to be clear that decommissioning is going to happen,” Mandelson said. “We cannot partially implement the Good Friday agreement. It is all or nothing.”

Trimble welcomed the planned suspension and indicated that he would give the government a few more days to try to resolve the crisis. He said the IRA’s refusal to start disarming or even lay out how it planned to do so amounted to a “contemptuous response” to the peace process.

Trimble’s deputy first minister, Catholic nationalist Seamus Mallon, was a lone voice of opposition in the House of Commons, urging the British government not to take hasty action that would “make it immeasurably more difficult, if not ultimately impossible,” for the IRA to disarm.

Sinn Fein has long insisted that the IRA must be given time to disarm “voluntarily” and that IRA members cannot be pressed to meet deadlines unilaterally imposed by their former enemies; in their eyes, that amounts to surrender.

Mallon, of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, said the government was playing into the hands of opponents of the peace process. The priority of the disarmament commission, he said, must be to secure the answer to two questions from paramilitary groups: Will they disarm and, if so, when?

Ahern, Ireland’s prime minister, has been working feverishly for days to secure a clear statement from the IRA on disarmament, but Trimble indicated that that would not be sufficient to prevent his resignation.

“We’ve had so many forms of words. There’s only one thing that’s going to carry any credibility and that’s the IRA actually doing things and not talking about them,” Trimble said earlier in the day.

After Mandelson’s announcement, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams appealed for an urgent meeting with Trimble. Other republican leaders expressed outrage at the proposed suspension.

“The British government and Peter Mandelson need to be careful to stand up to the blackmail of the unionists,” said Sinn Fein chairman Mitchel McLaughlin.

But support for Sinn Fein on this issue has been dwindling. Irish nationalists have been calling for the IRA to make at least a token gesture toward disarmament, and an obviously irritated Ahern said late Thursday that “for the Irish government, this issue has to be confronted once and for all.”

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Times special correspondent William Graham in Belfast contributed to this report.