Britain and Ireland may shelve new peace plans

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Britain and Ireland may shelve plans to revive Northern Ireland's power-sharing government for months, negotiators said Friday, after the symbolically important Good Friday religious holiday passed without a deal.

In an expression of the worsening atmosphere, the Protestant leader of the British province's mothballed power-sharing administration, David Trimble, called the Irish Republican Army "a couple of hundred hoods."

Trimble, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, accused the outlawed group of reneging on its end of an emerging deal that would have secured the landmark 1998 Good Friday accords.

The sides hoped to have a deal by Good Friday this year, but that appeared increasingly unlikely. They conceded their focus already had shifted to shelving their diplomatic initiative, possibly until the autumn.

"If at this stage we can't achieve the sufficient degree of clarity that's necessary, I would imagine that it would take a matter of months for the governments to bring matters to a stage where any other attempt could be made," Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell said.

Negotiations would be extremely difficult over the summer because it is typically a season of widespread clashes between Protestant marchers and Catholic protesters. The first large-scale Protestant marches start Monday.

Negotiators for the British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, spent weeks pressing leaders of the Sinn Fein-IRA movement to renounce all forms of violence and accept the legitimacy of Northern Ireland's police force. They consider such commitments the only way to stem Protestant hostility toward cooperation with Sinn Fein.

Last weekend, the IRA offered Blair and Ahern a proposed statement, but both British and Irish negotiators said it did not go far enough.

Leaks of the plans indicate Britain would withdraw more troops, close more bases and guarantee freedom for IRA fugitives in exchange for clear-cut IRA moves toward peace.

Trimble said Britain must spell out whether it is worth staging a planned May 29 election for Northern Ireland's legislature, which was shut down in October after police found evidence of IRA spying within its heart.

"What's the point of an election to something that doesn't function?" Trimble said.

Britain, Ireland and the Ulster Unionists fear that Northern Ireland's increasingly polarized voters could throw majority support behind Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party, and the most hard-line Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists. That combination would make power-sharing all but impossible because of the enmity between the two parties.

McDowell would not say whether the two governments were likely to delay the election for Northern Ireland's 108-seat legislature again. The vote was scheduled for May 1.

Sinn Fein has been organizing its campaign for months and is anxious for the vote to proceed. The party, which has steadily gained support since the IRA cease-fire of 1997, is favored to beat its moderate rival for Catholic votes, the Social Democratic and Labor Party.

Winning most Catholic seats would give Sinn Fein equal authority to the largest Protestant party in the next legislature and administration.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, in an address Thursday night to party election workers, called for the Blair-Ahern document to be published now, and said the IRA then would make its own public declaration. He emphasized that British and Protestant efforts to put words in the IRA's mouth were doomed to fail.

"The commitments contained in all the statements should be implemented by all sides: The Brits, the IRA, the Irish government, the unionists -- everyone," he said.