Britain Restores Power to Assembly in Northern Ireland

Britain ordered power to be handed back to Northern Ireland’s Protestant-Roman Catholic government at midnight Saturday and plotted a longer-term effort to restore faith in the province’s shaky 1998 peace accord.

Britain decided to take direct control of Northern Ireland for 24 hours, a maneuver aimed at allowing it to postpone a Saturday deadline for the province’s legislature to elect a new Protestant leader.

Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble resigned as first minister July 1 and said his Protestant party would not fill the post as required unless the Irish Republican Army scrapped its weapons first.

An abortive vote Saturday would have compelled Britain to dissolve the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The new deadline was expected to be Sept. 24.

Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid, signed the order authorizing the transfer of authority back to local control after he met Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen on Saturday for a formal “review” of the crisis.

A start to IRA disarmament is a key goal that Britain and Ireland have set in their latest joint plans, unveiled recently and still awaiting acceptance by Northern Ireland’s parties.

Cowen said the two governments have “put forward proposals that indicate the route map for the full implementation of the agreement.”

“We have a common mind and a common commitment to make this process work,” Reid said.

But reminders of the province’s bloody past and polarized present were evident Saturday.

Emotions ran high in Omagh, a religiously mixed town west of Belfast, the provincial capital, where IRA dissidents claimed responsibility for a 1998 car bombing that killed 29 people and wounded more than 200.

Relatives of the dead gathered to publicize their lawsuit against five alleged senior members of the so-called Real IRA, a splinter paramilitary group, including three men awaiting trial in the Republic of Ireland on charges of terrorist activity. No one has been convicted in connection with the attack.

The victims’ relatives and their lawyers declined to say what damages they would seek in court.

While the Omagh gathering united Catholics and Protestants, rival communities in north Belfast maintained a tense standoff related to Northern Ireland’s traditional summertime Protestant parades.

One of the province’s pro-British Protestant fraternal groups, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, staged hundreds of parades Saturday across Northern Ireland.

A few threatened to stir up sectarian conflict in Catholic areas, particularly in Ardoyne, a Catholic enclave of north Belfast that suffered protracted rioting in June and July.

Riot police prevented a small group of Apprentice Boys from marching on a main road in the Ardoyne area.