Bombing Intensifies Tension In Ireland Ira Denies Planting Device That Blew Face Off Hotel

A car bomb ravaged a country hotel Sunday soon after the building had been evacuated. The blast knocked hotel guests to the pavement and capped a week of rioting that threatens to transform Northern Ireland’s uneasy peace into a memory.

The Irish Republican Army denied Sunday that it had planted the bomb that blasted the Killyhevlin Hotel.

The hotel was packed with guests at a Catholic wedding party, bar patrons, tourists and fishermen when a caller warned hotel staff a bomb was planted in a car parked outside. Police said an Isuzu Trooper, stolen 11 days ago in Dublin, Ireland, contained 1,200 pounds of homemade explosives.

Police praised the hotel staff for evacuating 250 guests to a back parking lot before the bomb tore apart the building’s front 25 minutes later.

Scores were treated for shock; only three people suffered slight injuries.

The bomb - the first in Northern Ireland since the IRA stopped its violent campaign against British rule in 1994 - crowned the worst week of rioting in the province in a generation.

Violence erupted last Sunday when police blocked members of the Orange Order, Northern Ireland’s dominant Protestant fraternal group, from marching through a Catholic part of Portadown, a town 25 miles southwest of the capital of Belfast.

The Orangemen stood their ground, and militant Protestants subjected Northern Ireland to four days of rioting.

Since Thursday, when police conceded defeat and allowed the march through the Catholic area, Catholic fury has spilled onto the streets. Police and soldiers spent a third night Saturday repelling mobs of Catholics who hurled gasoline bombs, bricks and rocks at them in Belfast and Londonderry.

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The IRA-allied Sinn Fein party, which throughout the 17-month IRA truce pleaded in vain to start peace talks with the province’s Protestant leaders, mobilized several thousand marchers Sunday in west Belfast.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams told the crowd that peace has been squandered by Protestant demands that the IRA disarm. To cheers, Adams suggested the past week’s events have demonstrated “why the IRA said it will not surrender its weapons.”