Northern Ireland

THE GOOD NEWS from Northern Ireland is considerable and also, it is hoped, contagious. Executive government is back with David Trimble as first minister. He was approved by the majority of members of the assembly, by his Ulster Unionist Party and by the loyalist grass roots as polled. The new deputy first minister is Mark Durkan, new leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), which has been the main political voice of the Catholic minority for three decades. Mr. Durkan represents generational change from Seamus Mallon in government and from John Hume in leading the party that pioneered civil rights and constitutional nationalism.

LONDON - The moderate Protestant leader David Trimble overcame the blocking tactics of hard-line Protestant opponents yesterday and was re-elected first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The election in Belfast of Trimble and of a new deputy first minister - Mark Durkan of the moderate Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party - held out the promise of a sustained functioning life for the power-sharing government for the first time since it was created by the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

In the Northern Ireland town of Omagh, a group of citizens gathered around a small garden Friday to memorialize the victims of Tuesday's devastating attacks in the United States. Michael Gallagher stepped forward and placed on the soil an American flag that had hung in his son Adrian's room since 1991. The garden itself was created to commemorate another tragedy, a 1998 car bombing not far from this spot that had killed 29 people and injured hundreds more. One of the dead was 21-year-old Adrian, who had driven into the bustling shopping district that Saturday to buy a pair of jeans and boots.

LONDON - The Irish Republican Army dealt a serious blow to the Northern Ireland peace process yesterday by withdrawing the disarmament offer it made last week, diminishing hopes for a relatively swift solution to the deadlock clouding the future of the Good Friday peace agreement. In a terse statement, the IRA blamed Protestants for rejecting the disarmament offer and the British for briefly suspending the Northern Ireland assembly. "The conditions therefore do not exist for progressing our proposal.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - For the first time in Northern Ireland's current stalemate, the Irish Republican Army offered publicly yesterday to put its arsenal of explosives, rifles and mortars "completely and verifiably beyond use." But the 11th-hour gesture failed to break a deadlock that threatens the province's political institutions with at least temporary shutdown by the weekend. The prospect of a suspension of Northern Ireland's 108-seat Assembly inspired increasing acrimony across the province's divide, raising the possibility that the IRA's disarmament offer could be withdrawn if British authorities go ahead with the shutdown.

LONDON - For Northern Ireland's peacemakers, this has been a summer of stalemate and a season filled with ominous hints of possible violence to come. From Friday's car bomb explosion in west London, believed to have been triggered by the dissident terrorist group Real IRA, to clashes on Belfast's streets to a political deadlock over terrorist weapons and local policing, the peace process has never seemed so frayed. Northern Ireland's pro-peace parties face a deadline tomorrow to respond to the British and Irish governments' "take-it-or-leave-it" package of proposals designed to save the 3-year-old Good Friday peace accord.

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, said yesterday that they had agreed on a take-it-or-leave-it package of proposals to rescue the faltering Northern Ireland peace agreement and that they would present it to the province's warring politicians next week. Blair said there would be no further negotiations on the document, which he said would demand compromises on all sides. He pleaded with the leaders to "consider them carefully" and not respond with "knee-jerk reactions."

Continuing violence against Catholics blocks Irish peace The Sun's editorial "The guns of Ulster, cont'd" (June 26) suggests the IRA will be responsible for the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement if it does not decommission its weapons. This is patently untrue. The IRA has always tied the "put beyond use" of its weapons to the demilitarization of Northern Ireland by the British army and the reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the Northern Ireland police force). Each of these points was recommended by the Patten Commission but has yet to be implemented.

SINN FEIN, the political alter-ego of the "military" IRA, overtook the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP) in the June 7 election to become the pre-eminent political voice of the Catholic nationalist minority of Northern Ireland. Was this a reward for coming into constitutional politics, or for intransigence against the disarmament that was promised? Post-election polls suggest that most Sinn Fein supporters want the IRA to disarm. This it has refused to do. The Good Friday agreement requires parties to use their influence to persuade affiliated paramilitaries to disarm.

City Council gave Hizzoner the budget he wanted,and G. W. Bush wonders why he can't have a council like that. NMD will never stop a missile. Its purpose is to shoot down treaties that Secretary Rumsfeld disapproves, and it can do that just fine. Unnamed Iranians are unindicted co-conspirators in the Khobar Towers bombing. That's getting them? Northern Ireland is gripped by nostalgia for the '80s.