N. Ireland Cabinet Risks Losing Authority

Britain announced Friday that it will strip authority from Northern Ireland’s power-sharing Cabinet in seven days if the Irish Republican Army doesn’t confirm that it will disarm.

The announcement by Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson means that the Cabinet would be rendered powerless a day before a planned vote by the province’s major Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, on whether to remain in the four-party administration.

The British government considers Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble’s survival as party and Cabinet leader essential. Trimble, who has faced down Protestant opposition at critical moments of compromise, agreed to share power with the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party only on condition of IRA disarmament.

This week’s report by the province’s independent disarmament commission said IRA representatives had offered no commitments.

Mandelson said the 1998 Good Friday peace pact had challenged every interest group in Northern Ireland to make painful concessions.

That means the province’s British Protestant majority had been required to accept both early paroles for IRA prisoners and Sinn Fein as Cabinet colleagues, Mandelson said.

It also means that disarmament must “underwrite with actions the paramilitaries’ stated commitment to peace,” he said.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams insisted that the outlawed IRA was “an undefeated army” and shouldn’t be forced to scrap its hidden arms dumps, a process that the peace accord envisaged should be finished by May.