Irish leader doubts sincerity of IRA’s offer to disarm

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – The Irish Republican Army is probably bluffing and won’t disarm or disband in support of revived Northern Ireland power-sharing, Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble told his party’s annual conference Saturday.

Trimble shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize after steering British Protestants toward a historic peace accord with Northern Ireland’s Irish Catholic minority. But his once-dominant Ulster Unionists have hemorrhaged support ever since he formed a cross-community administration involving Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party.

The Trimble-led coalition suffered several breakdowns over the IRA’s refusal to start disarming, and collapsed in late 2002 over an IRA spying scandal. Last year most Protestant voters turned to the hard-line Democratic Unionists led by Ian Paisley, who refuses to work with Sinn Fein until the IRA disappears.

The British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, say they have received private assurances from Sinn Fein that the IRA will fully disarm if the Democratic Unionists give cast-iron commitments to cooperate fully in return.

But Trimble told his party conference that he thinks Sinn Fein has misled the prime ministers. He blamed the Democratic Unionists – who refuse to negotiate directly with Sinn Fein – for failing to find out what, if anything, is really on offer from the IRA.

“Like other parties, we do not know what republicans supposedly offered to Blair. I suspect the offer was more a bluff than anything else,” Trimble said. “Blair should have nailed it down, but with characteristic optimism he rushed at it.”

Trimble said the Democratic Unionists “could have covered themselves by confronting republicans and insisting they give clear details. But rather than engage in serious negotiations, they hid behind other issues.”

With a British general election expected next year, Trimble said his party needed to regain its majority position among Northern Ireland’s Protestants or public opinion in Britain would turn against their community. He said most lawmakers in Blair’s governing Labour Party view Paisley, an overtly anti-Catholic minister, and his Democratic Unionist colleagues with “scarcely concealed contempt.”