Sinn Fein Chieftain Has Talk With Blair Warring Sides’ First Meeting Since 1921

At a historic, high-risk meeting for both men, Irish republican leader Gerry Adams went to Downing Street on Thursday to tell Prime Minister Tony Blair that Britain must leave Northern Ireland.

That’s not on the agenda, Blair said.

The high-gloss encounter was the first since 1921 between a Sinn Fein leader and a prime minister at the heart of government, and it was powerfully symbolic: The Cabinet Room where Thursday’s 80-minute meeting occurred over handshakes and a spot of tea was shaken by an Irish Republican Army mortar during a Cabinet meeting in 1991.

It was Adams who did most of the public talking Thursday. But it was Blair who arranged the encounter as a means of wrapping Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed IRA, ever more tightly within the democratic, nonviolent political process.

“We faced up to the difficulties. In many ways the engagement could be described as a moment in history,” said Adams, flanked outside No. 10 by six other Sinn Fein delegates.

“We certainly had the opportunity to put our view that all the hurt and grief and division which has come from British involvement in our affairs has to end,” Adams said while pro- and anti-Sinn Fein demonstrators shouted across police lines.

As Adams headed into the talks, he was intercepted by Rita Restorick, whose son Stephen was the last British soldier killed by the IRA before a cease-fire. She handed Adams a Christmas card and a plea for peace.

The meeting between Blair and Adams, coming at a time when peace talks in divided Northern Ireland lack momentum, was called “constructive and positive” by the prime minister’s spokesman. Blair himself later repeated that the aim of the talks is peace, not the unification of Ireland.

Northern Ireland will remain British, Blair has said repeatedly.

His spokesman said Blair sat across from Adams and told him, “It is important that I can look you in the eye and hear you say that you remain committed to peaceful means.”

Adams and Blair first met two months ago in Belfast. Adams since has begun to publicly acknowledge that the current talks are just a steppingstone toward fulfilling Sinn Fein’s dream for a united Ireland.

The meeting occurred six months after two policemen were murdered by the IRA while walking their beat in Northern Ireland, and six days after Adams, Martin McGuinness, his deputy, and Martin Ferris, another Sinn Fein participant Thursday, were identified by the British Broadcasting Corp. as senior leaders of the IRA. All three deny it.

Among leaders of majority Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain a British province - all of them outraged by Thursday’s meeting - there is a conviction that an IRA cease-fire in place since July is a ploy.

“Other countries don’t invite unreconstructed terrorists to the negotiating table,” said Ken Maginnis, spokesman for the Ulster Unionists, the largest Protestant party in Northern Ireland. Blair is “misguided,” he said. “What Gerry Adams wants Gerry Adams gets and he will demand more and more and more.”