Best Efforts May Not Save N. Ireland Pact

The Irish Republican Army’s political allies fought desperately Tuesday to save provincial government in Northern Ireland, something they would have battled to bring down themselves not so many years ago.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams led a delegation of Roman Catholic nationalists to 10 Downing St. to plead with British Prime Minister Tony Blair not to suspend Belfast’s 8-week-old power-sharing government over the IRA’s refusal to begin disarming.

And Sinn Fein negotiator Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA member who holds a seat in the British Parliament, ventured into the House of Commons for the first time--albeit only the visitors gallery--in search of support for the administration in which he serves as education minister.

Despite these political leaps by Britain’s old enemies, the fledgling provincial government hurtled toward collapse--a failure that none of its members wants and that none can see a way to prevent.

And the efforts of Adams and McGuinness only seemed to highlight the irreconcilable positions of Sinn Fein and the Protestant unionists, and to create a sense that the collapse of the government, if not the entire peace process, is inevitable.

A frustrated Peter Mandelson, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, pushed a bill through the lower house allowing Britain to resume direct rule of the province. He stressed that he hopes not to use the power he sought, while insisting that a pause would “preserve the institutions and enable them to be revived at a future date.”

The bill, which is expected to become law by Friday, would allow Mandelson to suspend the Northern Ireland government before a crucial meeting Saturday of the executive council of the major Protestant party in the province, the Ulster Unionists.

Party leader David Trimble had promised to resign as first minister of the devolved government Saturday if there was no IRA movement on arms. On Tuesday, both Adams and McGuinness urged him not to quit.

The 1998 Good Friday peace agreement called for the creation of a Protestant-Catholic government and for all political parties to work for the disarmament of paramilitary groups by May 2000, but the two sides were deadlocked for months over who should move first.

In November, Trimble won the backing of 58% of his party leaders to form a government with Sinn Fein ahead of IRA disarmament in the belief that the guns would soon follow.

The IRA sent a representative to talk with Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, head of the independent commission charged with overseeing disarmament under the peace accord. But on Jan. 31, De Chastelain reported to the British and Irish governments that none of Northern Ireland’s Protestant or Catholic paramilitary groups had taken action toward disarming. Of particular concern was the IRA, because Protestant groups apparently indicated that they would follow the republicans’ lead.

To prevent Trimble’s resignation--a step London fears would be irreversible--the British government moved to suspend the Northern Ireland government. At the same time, British and Irish officials pressed Sinn Fein and the IRA to produce, if not a single gun, at least a schedule for disarming.

“If the war is over, why do arms still need to be retained?” Mandelson demanded in the House of Commons as McGuinness listened from the gallery. “If violence is a thing of the past, why can’t weapons of violence be put permanently beyond use?”

Sinn Fein’s short answer is that the IRA will never give up its guns so long as unionists unilaterally demand it--and they see the Saturday deadline as a unilateral demand by unionists because it is not a date written into the peace agreement.

But short answers rarely suffice in a 30-year conflict of sectarian hatreds and political divisions that has taken more than 3,600 lives. Most of Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority consists of pro-British unionists; most of the Catholic minority, long denied equal rights and power in the six-county province, aspires to a united Ireland.

To unionists who support the peace process, the demand for IRA disarmament stems from both principle and pragmatism. They believe that no party in a democratic government should be allowed to have its own army and that they should not have to govern with a gun to their heads.

Sinn Fein says that the IRA’s actions should speak for themselves and that the IRA guns have been “silent” since the group announced a cease-fire in 1994. Over the weekend, the IRA issued a statement that it believes “the arms issue can be resolved,” but it quickly added that “this will not be on British or unionist terms” or advanced by a suspension of the government.

To an outsider, this might seem like macho posturing, the political equivalent of refusing to clean the garage because your mate asked you to do it. But to the IRA, a secret military organization handed down from generation to generation, it is a matter of honor and of guarantees for change.

“Within the nationalist republican community, people see the demand for ‘decommissioning’ a la Ulster unionism as surrender,” McGuinness said. “They view it as an attempt by unionism to have a military victory at a time of peace, and it doesn’t make sense to people.”

In an unusual display of frankness, McGuinness explained what Sinn Fein really envisions happening:

“I don’t believe the [IRA] guy in County Armagh will ever give up anything to a decommissioning commission,” he said. “But I do believe we can create the situation in which armed groups eventually will destroy their own weapons. That takes away the issue of surrender.”

Suspending the Northern Ireland government, in which Sinn Fein has two seats in a 12-member Cabinet, will make disarmament less likely, he said. Just as unionists distrust Sinn Fein and the IRA, so Catholic nationalists distrust the unionists. They fear that the peace process may be a unionist ploy to get republican guns but retain power in the hands of Protestants under British rule.

For most Catholics, the peace process is a way to achieve their goal of a united Ireland through democratic means.

McGuinness and Adams are elected members of the British Parliament who have never been allowed to take their seats because they refuse to pledge an oath of allegiance to the queen. McGuinness is widely known to have been an IRA commander in Belfast, the provincial capital, although he has never publicly admitted it, and the IRA opposed the last, brief power-sharing government that sat at Belfast’s Stormont Parliament building in 1972.

So McGuinness found himself in the historically odd position of appealing almost desperately for the unionist-led government to stay in power.

“I don’t want David Trimble to resign,” he said. “I want David Trimble to reign on as first minister. It would be a disaster if he were to resign and just as big a disaster if the government were to suspend the institutions. If the institutions are suspended, the likelihood of getting them back is zero.”

Adams concurred.

“I see no reason why David Trimble should resign or why the institutions should be suspended,” he said. “For the life of me, I have yet to find an intelligent answer from the British government or unionism to the question [of] if you suspend the government, what happens next?”

By the end of the day, Adams’ mood had turned sour. A suspension of the Northern Ireland government, he warned, could prompt his resignation as the leader of Sinn Fein--and as the main republican behind the peace process.