EUROPE	JANUARY 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	Out of the Labyrinth At last, Northern Ireland gets a peace plan with light at the end of the tunnel By JAMES WALSH nder the chill skies of West Belfast, a lone piper led a funeral procession last week from Upper Whiterock Road to Holy Trinity Church. The anguish of mourners seeing off a young man cut down in his prime made for a scene all too familiar in Northern Ireland after nearly 30 years of sectarian killings and mayhem. In this case, however, the grieving crowd, some 10,000 strong either marching or on the sidelines, included both Catholics and Protestants. They had turned out for 28-year-old Terry Enright, a popular youth worker shot dead the previous weekend as he moonlighted as a doorman at a city center nightclub. Tragic as the ceremony was for his family and friends, it may also have marked a fresh start for long-suffering Ulster, where a political formula advanced by London and Dublin one day earlier seemed to offer the brightest hope for peace in a generation. Though Enright was married to a niece of Gerry Adams--president of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, and the province's most visible symbol of resistance to British rule--he had spent much time helping disadvantaged teenagers from the other side of the barricades. In a sense, he was on the other side of the barricades when he died. The club where he was murdered by gunmen from the extremist Loyalist Volunteer Force is owned by relatives of Progressive Unionist Party spokesman David Ervine, whose faction represents one of the truce-observing Protestant paramilitaries. Ervine described the slain father of two little girls as "a fine young man" and denounced the attack as an effort to embarrass him. If so, the attempt certainly backfired: Ervine and other unionists showed up in force for a session of all-party talks reviewing the Anglo-Irish blueprint for a settlement. The new plan evoked some grumbles from Sinn Fein, but all negotiators agreed that they could work with it. London was delighted by the negotiation breakthrough. "It is very encouraging what has happened," said Paul Murphy, political development minister for Northern Ireland. He added pointedly, "It could have gone the other way, which, our experience teaches us, is often the way they go in Northern Ireland." In fact, for 18 months the talks at Stormont's Castle Buildings had dragged on with no party willing to specify exactly what compromises it might live with. The Christmas recess signaled a make-or-break time for the effort, which Sinn Fein joined last year after the British Labour Party won office and managed to woo the i.r.a. into resuming an armistice. If the republicans and unionists did not find some grounds for pursuing a modus vivendi by this May, conciliators feared, the talks might seem futile to everyone, giving way to summer confrontations and street violence. With the prospect of forfeiting all that had been gained, the governments of Britain and the Irish Republic, co-sponsors of the talks, scrambled for some means to break the ice. Their mission became all the more desperate two days after Christmas, when a convicted loyalist paramilitary leader named Billy Wright, widely known as King Rat for his acts of brutality, was killed inside the maximum-security Maze prison near Belfast by inmates belonging to a fringe, no-compromise republican faction. That killing in turn prompted Wright's extremist followers to single out Catholics for random revenge murders. At that point, Mo Mowlam, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, took a huge risk. Like Theseus penetrating the labyrinth, she went into the Maze to beard the Minotaur of violence directly. Confronting the loyalist inmates, many of them convicted for numerous acts of murder and terrorism, she persuaded their leaders to give the talks a chance and not to exercise their veto of gun and bomb. Last week, as she appeared in the House of Commons in London for the first question time since the Christmas break, she was greeted by cheers. The fact that most parties at the Belfast negotiations had come away from the resumed discussions on an optimistic note was all that she and Prime Minister Tony Blair could hope for. Blair and his counterpart in Dublin, Bertie Ahern, had put their combined weight behind the wheel with much concentration. They kept in constant touch with each other, while Blair was vacationing in the Seychelles and Ahern in Spain, then again just before resumption of the talks as Blair was visiting Japan. Dining in a sushi restaurant in Kamakura, outside of Tokyo, Blair repeatedly broke away to confer by telephone with the Irish Prime Minister as well as Mowlam, Adams and Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble, who leads the province's largest mainstream pro-British faction. What emerged was a formula not unlike the so-called Framework Document set forth by London and Dublin in 1995, but a bit more ambiguous. It calls for an autonomous Northern Ireland legislature featuring cross-border institutional links with the Irish Republic to deal with matters such as agriculture and tourism. But it does not say outright that this all-Ireland council would have "executive" powers. Trimble and other unionists had considered the 1995 plan too much of a sop to Sinn Fein and a possible wedge for fulfilling the republican ambition of reunifying Ireland. All that the present plan suggests is a council made up of ministers from both sides of the border "with executive responsibilities." That pleased unionists, although a Dublin insider notes, "The word executive is in there. What decisions do ministers with executive responsibility take other than executive decisions?" Still, the Belfast assembly could veto any council action. Adams called the watered-down phrasing a broken promise, but Sinn Fein nonetheless agreed to keep negotiating. Another innovation that rankled republicans was the idea for something informally called the Council of the Isles, a body linking the forthcoming assemblies in Scotland and Wales with Ulster's as well as London and Dublin. Ulster Unionist M.P. Jeffrey Donaldson remarked, "The I.R.A. must be very, very nervous about this document because it envisages a continuation of Northern Ireland's place within the United Kingdom." Yet, as Ervine observed, "Nobody will be delighted 100%, but we have been trying a long time to get to this point." As Enright's funeral demonstrated, moreover, the war-weariness of ordinary people in Ulster will make it hard for politics to retreat from that point. SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE Compromises by nature include features all sides dislike, but the Anglo-Irish agenda also includes plenty of sweeteners [PROPOSAL] NOTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY [FUNCTION] Revives the provincial legislature dissolved a generation ago, but now with proportional representation to ensure a voice for Catholics. [PROS & CONS] Gives all parties a mechanism to work out their own future, though diehard republicans see it as an obstacle to reuniting all of Ireland. ------------------------- [PROPOSAL] NORTH-SOUTH MINISTERIAL COUNCIL [FUNCTION] A consultative body linking the Ulster and Irish Republic governments in dealing with border-crossing issues like health, tourism and agriculture. [PROS & CONS] Provides for cooperation between both sides of the divided island, but pro-British forces are wary of an all-Ireland government in embryo. ------------------------- [PROPOSAL] AMENDMENTS TO ARTICLES 2 AND 3 OF IRISH CONSTITUTION [FUNCTION] Calls for Dublin to renounce the Republic's long-held claims to Northern Ireland despite Ulster's majority desire to remain British. [PROS & CONS] Reassures unionists in the North as London amends its own act that set up the province. The I.R.A., however, tends to regard the idea as a sellout. ------------------------- [PROPOSAL] INTERGOVERNMENT COUNCIL OF NORTHERN IRELAND, WALES AND SCOTLAND [FUNCTION] Alias the "Council of the Isles," this body is envisioned as a talking shop for representatives of the new autonomous regional assemblies. [PROS & CONS] Affords new links with the U.K., encouraging pro-British factions to give some ground but amounting to a hard nut for republicans to accept. ------------------------- [PROPOSAL] BRITISH AND IRISH GOVERNMENT COOPERATION [FUNCTION] Would establish "machinery" for London and Dublin to consult on some Northern Ireland issues not within the writ of Ulster home rule. [PROS & CONS] Gives Dublin a voice in some of the North's affairs, which should gratify republicans but may strike unionists as unacceptable interference. --Reported by Tony Connelly /Dublin, Paul Connolly /Belfast and Barry Hillenbrand /London
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