November 30, 2003	Sunday	Shawwal 5, 1424

BELFAST, Nov 29: Britain launched efforts to salvage the Northern Ireland peace process on Saturday after election gains for Protestant and Catholic hardliners threw the survival of the province’s five-year-old peace pact into doubt.

Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy was holding a series of meetings with local politicians after a poll which sharpened divisions between unionists from the Protestant majority, who favour continued British rule, and Catholic nationalists who want to join the south in a united Ireland.

“It’s going to be more difficult (as a result of the election), but all the four big parties agree they want devolution for Northern Ireland. That’s not a bad start,” Murphy told Reuters on Saturday.

Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly, the centrepiece of a 1998 peace deal which then-US President Bill Clinton helped to broker, has been suspended since October last year when a shaky Protestant/Catholic coalition broke down over allegations of IRA spying.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) led by fiery Protestant cleric Ian Paisley, a die-hard opponent of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, emerged as the largest group in the moth-balled legislature when vote-counting was completed on Friday.

The Irish Republican Army’s (IRA’s) political ally Sinn Fein — whose leaders Paisley brands “murderers and reprobates” and refuses to speak to — was the big winner among Catholic voters.

The governments in London and Dublin had hoped Wednesday’s twice-delayed election would provide impetus for rival politicians to reach a deal on restoring the assembly and so safeguard the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which aimed to end three decades of sectarian violence.

But with two parties who plainly cannot work together entitled to the top posts of first and deputy first minister in any new home rule administration, the prospects of a swift restoration of power-sharing are bleak.

Although a majority of new assembly members overall back the Good Friday pact, Paisley’s DUP can block progress because the rules of power-sharing require the formation of a new government to be endorsed by both the unionist and nationalist blocs.

On Saturday Murphy was meeting Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, whose party eclipsed the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading voice for minority Catholics, and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) chief David Trimble.

Trimble faces calls to quit by dissidents in his party after the moderate UUP, dominant among Protestants since the foundation of Northern Ireland in 1921, fell behind the DUP.

“Every event makes you reflect, but I am not minded to go,” said Trimble, who shared a Nobel peace prize for his role in negotiating the 1998 accord.

“This is not the time to abandon one’s post and one’s responsibilities and to put one’s own personal preferences ahead of the public interest,” he told BBC radio on Saturday.

Among the main Protestant parties, the DUP won 30 seats in the 108-member assembly, up 10 on the 1998 election result. The UUP was down one at 27. Sinn Fein took 24 seats, overtaking the SDLP, which lost six from its total in the last election, to leave it with 18.—Reuters