"Good Friday is dead"

Britain is to blame for greatest crisis in Northern Ireland since the cease-fire began.

By Margaret Spillane and Bruce Shapiro

Feb 18, 2000 | "Keep your nerve," Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, used to remind his allies in Northern Ireland's Republican political circles during particularly edgy moments leading up to the Good Friday peace accords signed in 1998.

But Wednesday afternoon, Adam's own patience sounded profoundly frayed. Britain had suspended Northern Ireland's promising new power-sharing government and the Irish Republican Army withdrew from disarmament talks. British and Irish prime ministers held crisis meetings at Number 10 Downing Street, to try and restore the suspended government.

The talks reportedly bore little fruit. "The institutions have been torn down and the Good Friday Agreement has been torn up," Adams said outside in exasperation. By Friday, leaders from all sides were booking flights to Washington for White House meetings next week.

The current crisis is the most profound since the IRA's current cease-fire began in 1995. Adams and his IRA-allied Sinn Fein are at loggerheads with suspended First Minister David Trimble. Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party provoked the current crisis by threatening to withdraw from the government altogether if the IRA did not satisfy Trimble's personal deadline for a disarmament timetable.

Britain's suspension of the power-sharing government also infuriated Dublin, where the new Northern Irish institutions have been written into the Republic of Ireland's constitution after a popular referendum.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern believes Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson's suspension of the Belfast government -- supposedly designed to buy time -- has no basis in law, and puts whole process in jeopardy: "Each day they are suspended is a day in which further damage is being done to the well-being of the agreement," Ahern said Tuesday.

The immediate source of today's crisis was a revival of what is known in Northern Ireland parlance as "the "Unionist Veto" -- the long tradition Ulster's Protestant majority rejecting any accommodation with the Roman Catholic minority, now nearly half the population of the province. Mandelson's predecessor Mo Mowlam periodically angered Unionists by declining their veto demands, and Mandelson was named in part to assuage that fury.

In this case, Mandelson decided to accommodate the Unionist veto in the form of Trimble's insistence that his Ulster Unionists would only remain in the new government if the IRA began handing in its arms by February. It was a demand completely outside the terms of the Good Friday accord, which set a May date for all of Northern Ireland's Catholic Republican and Protestant loyalist paramilitaries to cooperate with an international disarmament commission.

Trimble's demand turned last week into an occasion for Belfast brinksmanship. The IRA's leadership repeatedly asserted its commitment to the Good Friday process, but not to Trimble's threats.

With Trimble threatening to bring down the government altogether, the IRA -- while vowing it would pose "no threat" to its cease-fire -- went down to the wire of Mendelson's self-imposed deadline last Friday before giving the disarmament commission reassurance that it would put its arsenal "beyond use" in keeping with the treaty. Ahern now maintains that Mandelson pulled the plug even though he knew the IRA proposal was on offer -- a charge London denies.

Mandelson, later admitting that the IRA's proposal was "a big advance," nonetheless drew a line in the sand and suspended the new government, returning rule of Ulster to London. On Tuesday, the IRA shut off contact with the arms commission and withdrew its offer from the table.

While Mandelson's move pacified the Unionists, it defied the logic of the past five years. When Northern Ireland's peace process has worked, it has been because a succession of intermediaries, ranging from Irish-American business leaders to Irish and British officials to Senator George Mitchell, insisted upon keeping the key parties at the table.

Officials continue to speak publicly about restoring the suspended Northern Ireland government as quickly as possible. But some of the most informed observers believe the Good Friday process as it has existed is finished. "Essentially, arms decommissioning is dead," said one intimate participant in the peace process.

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