North Irish Battle On in Streets, Cabinet

The Northern Ireland peace accord took a battering on several fronts Wednesday as Cabinet members clashed and violent attacks raised tensions.

A booby-trap device planted in a traffic cone by suspected Irish Republican Army dissidents exploded when a police officer tried to move it; the blast blew off his leg. The cone was placed at the entrance to the police station in a mostly Roman Catholic area south of Belfast.

British troops, meanwhile, were deployed in hard-line Protestant parts of north Belfast to try to suppress renewed violence between the province’s major pro-British gangs, the Ulster Defense Assn. and Ulster Volunteer Force.

But after dark Wednesday, a Protestant man with ties to the Ulster Volunteer Force was killed, and police said members of the Ulster Defense Assn. were suspected.

The outlawed groups are supposed to be observing a truce in support of the province’s 1998 peace pact. But they have been targeting each other’s supporters since August in a feud driven by competing criminal rackets and personal animosities.

The rising paramilitary activity added to pressures facing Northern Ireland’s joint Protestant-Catholic government, a fragile four-party coalition at the heart of the 1998 peace pact.

Last weekend, the senior Cabinet minister, Ulster Unionist Party chief David Trimble, promised he would restrict Sinn Fein ministers’ official contacts with the Irish government until the IRA makes good on its promise to disarm. He canceled a scheduled Friday meeting between the Irish government’s health minister and Sinn Fein member Bairbre de Brun, the health minister in the Northern Ireland administration.

But on Wednesday, the Irish government confirmed that its minister would meet with De Brun anyway.