N. Ireland Talks Start Over Without Sinn Fein

LONDON — Multi-party talks aimed at reconciling hate-filled Protestant and Roman Catholic communities in Northern Ireland resumed Tuesday on the same notes they opened with a year ago: frayed patience and angry words in the shadow of violence.

There was no progress, no hint of peace and no presence at the talks of spokespersons for the still-shooting Irish Republican Army.

“It is not hopeless. If I believed there was no chance for a peaceful resolution of the problems, I would not be here,” said former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell, who is chairing the Belfast talks, which are supported by Britain, Ireland and the United States.

But peace hopes echoed hollowly amid unslaked hatreds and accelerating violence in the six-county British province where minority Catholics seeking union with Ireland and majority Protestants loyal to Britain have feuded bloodily for three decades.

As the politicians wrangled anew on Tuesday, 41-year-old police officer Greg Taylor was buried. Taylor, a Protestant, was beaten and kicked to death over the weekend by Protestant militants angry that police rerouted their parade in the mainly Catholic village of Dunloy.

Taylor’s son Christopher, a 9-year-old with cerebral palsy, wept from his wheelchair as the Anglican bishop addressing the funeral congregation described the killing of the boy’s father as “wicked and savage in the extreme.”

And before dawn Tuesday, police and British army troops combed an area of north Belfast but found no trace of an anti-personnel mine that the IRA claimed to have left near an army base.

A six-week lull in IRA activity in Northern Ireland ended over the weekend with the discovery of a 1,000-pound bomb in a burned-out van. Police said the outlawed group had tried to lure them into a trap.

Amid tit-for-tat burnings of Catholic and Protestant churches, loyalist militants in Northern Ireland have been suspected in the fatal shootings of three Catholics in the past year and the injuring of others in booby-trap bomb attacks, while the IRA has concentrated its attacks and hoaxes on the British mainland.

“I have to say the activities of the last few days do not bode well,” said Marjorie Mowlam, the British government’s new Northern Ireland secretary, denouncing recent violence as “the kind of sectarianism in the guts of the community that I find deeply worrying.”

Just as he did a year ago, Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, made a for-the-cameras appearance before a locked chain-link fence outside the building where Mitchell and political leaders conferred in the presence of British and Irish government officials.

Sinn Fein has been denied any role in the talks until there is an IRA cease-fire.

Adams, who disputes the British view that Sinn Fein and the IRA are interlocking pieces of the same organization, says that his party deserves to attend the talks because it won a 16% share of the Northern Ireland vote in Britain’s May 1 election for a new Parliament. Adams and another Sinn Fein leader were elected to Parliament but cannot take their seats because they decline to swear allegiance to the queen.

“It is not good enough for the British and Irish governments to say that the onus is on Sinn Fein, or to excuse the actions of British forces or turn a blind eye to the actions of loyalists. Clearly there are double standards,” Adams said at the locked gate.

Mowlam, who has been beating the drums for a new peace initiative, reiterated Tuesday that the next move must be up to the IRA. “We would prefer to have Sinn Fein around the table rather than not, but that is dependent on a meaningful cease-fire, an unequivocal cease-fire with supporting words and deeds,” she said.

Visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London last week, President Clinton voiced renewed U.S. support for the search for peace.

In Washington on Tuesday, Clinton reiterated his message.

“I call on the political leaders to seize this precious opportunity and begin the hard but worthwhile work of negotiating a just and lasting settlement,” Clinton said in a statement issued by the White House.