A Break in the Storms Over Northern Ireland? : A flurry of negotiations raises slight hope of movement

Peace may be within view in Northern Ireland despite the fact that the province last month endured one of the most violent weeks in a generation of conflict between the mostly Protestant Unionists and the mostly Catholic Nationalists. For though the Unionists proclaim their loyalty to Britain and the Nationalists demand unification with the Republic of Ireland, Britain and Ireland themselves are closer to each other than to their putative proteges. News analyses and even editorials in mainstream Dublin and London newspapers are almost interchangeable. Increasingly, and more remarkably, so are public statements by key Irish and British political leaders.

On Oct. 27 Irish Deputy Prime Minister Dick Spring spelled out in a speech to the Dail (the Irish parliament) six principles for a Northern Ireland peace process that were all but duplicated in a speech that British Prime Minister John Major gave to Parliament, praising Spring, on Nov. 1. Since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, by which Britain granted Ireland a consultative voice in the future of Northern Ireland and Ireland formally recognized the right of the majority within the province to determine its own future, there has been a noteworthy working rapport between the two governments.

But that rapport has lately been energized by movement at a lower level. Within Northern Ireland, two Nationalist parties have long contended: Sinn Fein, the political partner of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, and the Social Democratic Labor Party, which looks forward to a single Irish state but renounces terrorism. Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, once a member of the British Parliament, has long since lost his seat to John Hume of the SDLP.

Adams, who recently was denied a visa to the United States by President Clinton, is barred from television in both countries, and both governments refuse to negotiate with Sinn Fein, the party he represents, because of its link to the IRA. Sinn Fein has been the PLO of Irish politics, in other words, and Gerry Adams has been its Yasser Arafat.

But just as secret meetings preceded the recent Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, so, starting last spring, Hume and Adams began a series of initially secret meetings, leading to a report that they sent to Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, who later forwarded part of it to Major. The Hume-Adams meetings were a scandal to many, proof that Hume was an IRA sympathizer. Then, last month, a Unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph, broke the far more scandalous story that senior British officials had met with ranking Sinn Fein representatives. Adams initially declined to either confirm or deny the report, then admitted it. Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, said only that no authorized meeting had taken place.

Back in 1985, the Anglo-Irish Agreement was repudiated by extremists on both sides. Hume may just have persuaded Adams to accept it. But can Adams deliver the IRA? If so, who will then play John Hume for the Unionist side, and is there a Unionist Gerry Adams to deliver the equally violent but more fragmented Unionist death squads?

Unionist terrorism has taken more lives this year than Nationalist terrorism, and the interception on Wednesday of a huge clandestine arms shipment intended for the Unionist Ulster Defense Assn. does not bode well. The signs are by no means all good, then, and yet for the first time in years there is enough movement to ground cautious hope.