New Leaders, New Hope for N. Ireland

LONDON — Meeting with U.S. reporters Thursday before her first official visit to Washington, new British Cabinet minister Marjorie Mowlam spoke with great animation about her hopes for resolving Northern Ireland’s bitter divisions.

Suddenly, Mowlam ripped off the lopsided blond wig she wears since going bald from radiation treatments and slammed it on the table alongside her coffee cup.

“I’m of a mood,” she said. “No hair.”

Mowlam’s message to President Clinton and U.S. officials on a round of calls today will be straight to the point: Thanks for the help and moral support, America. Stay with us now as we push to break an incendiary logjam.

But Mowlam herself is also the message: There’s new style, new substance--a vigorous, anything-but-stuffy new British government with fresh ideas and a can-do attitude. Clinton will sample the mood firsthand in meetings here with Prime Minister Tony Blair next week.

At 47, Northern Ireland Secretary Mowlam is the cutting edge of Blair’s search for peace in a British province where minority Catholics and majority Protestants have warred sporadically for decades. After months of tension, violence is accelerating there once again.

Earlier this week, British government officials met in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the militant Irish Republican Army, for the first time since the IRA ended a widely hailed cease-fire 15 months ago with a bomb at London’s Docklands.

Mowlam said there had been “informed, constructive discussions” between the two parties but insists that there can be no admission for Sinn Fein at peace talks scheduled to open June 3 if there is not an unequivocal cease-fire first.

In Washington, Mowlam said, she will tell the Clinton administration that it has made a difference in encouraging Sinn Fein to come in out of the cold. Britain would welcome renewed American pressure, Mowlam will suggest.

American goodwill and the “patience and endurance” of mediator George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, have been key aids in the painful, molasses-slow peace process so far, Mowlam said.

Mowlam is one of Britain’s new political stars: bright, warm, forthright, occasionally outrageous--and close to Blair. A former college professor, Mowlam has a doctorate in political science from the University of Iowa.

The outspoken Mowlam could hardly be more different from her predecessor, the patrician, stiff-upper-lipped Sir Patrick Mayhew, but she walks the same minefield--to mixed reviews.

Her drive and her earthiness have found strong echoes in Northern Ireland, but Mowlam’s lack of experience is also apparent. “I’ve never seen a more naive minister,” one analyst in Belfast said.

Protestants loyal to Britain, who are known as unionists, prefer Ulster in its current state--as a British province. Supporters of Sinn Fein, or nationalists, are mostly Catholic and want the province reunited with the Irish Republic.

The mistrust between the two communities is legendary, but Mowlam believes that it can be bridged by cultivating trust and through confidence-building measures.

It is unlikely that Sinn Fein will be at next month’s talks, Mowlam said, but there would be “no undue delay” in granting admission once a cease-fire and a formal Sinn Fein commitment to democratic principles are in place.

Mowlam arrived in Washington on Thursday night, with loyalist anger bobbing in her wake after she warned that unionists could be excluded from the talks if they walk out to oppose any eventual Sinn Fein arrival.

“Tony has made clear we will base policy on principles of justice and fairness. . . . We will not be driven by one side or the other,” she told U.S. reporters. “No one will have a veto.”

Mowlam’s peace-seeking task has frustrated all of her predecessors, but she goes to work in Washington this morning preceded by a formidable reputation.

In Redcar, the northeastern steel and chemical town she represents in Parliament, Mowlam is known as Mighty Mo. On May 1, voters sent Mowlam back to Parliament for a third term with nearly three times the votes they gave her closest opponent.

“She’s a doer, the sort of person who gets out in the streets to talk with the people who she thinks matters. It would be hard to find anybody in her constituency who’s not met her,” said Keith Legg, her assistant in Redcar.

In January, Mowlam was found to have a brain tumor. It proved nonmalignant, but radiation treatments and steroids took her hair and left her 30 pounds heavier. Now, Mowlam said, she has a clean bill of health and is off drugs. Bewigged or bald, Mowlam insisted Thursday that anything she told the American reporters was on the record.

“I don’t believe in talking off the record,” she said, grinning. “I don’t trust any of you bastards.” Game, set and wig to Mowlam.