Sinn Fein

LONDON - An investigator named the Irish Republican Army yesterday as the leading suspect in the largest bank robbery in British history, an announcement that roiled Northern Ireland's already fragile political peace process. With $50 million still missing after the military-style job at Belfast's Northern Bank on the evening of Dec. 20, Belfast Chief Constable Hugh Orde has found his investigation embroiled in sectarian politics in the province riven between Protestant loyalists and Catholic nationalists seeking independence.

LONDON - The Rev. Ian Paisley, the fire-and-brimstone preacher and politician admired by many Protestants in Northern Ireland and loathed by many Catholics, has a well-known nickname: Dr. No. He is the person who has controlled Protestant negotiations - and non-negotiations - in Northern Ireland virtually since the decades of violence began, a 78-year-old lightning rod who has rejected every peace deal offered, a man who has broadly referred to Catholics...

LONDON - The British and Irish governments acknowledged yesterday that they had been unable to resolve a pre-election dispute over the disarming of the Irish Republican Army but confirmed that next month's vote for the Northern Ireland Assembly would go ahead as planned. The assembly, created by the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement to apportion power between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority, has been suspended for a year, and intensive efforts had gone into reviving it before the election Nov. 26. Those efforts suffered a major collapse in Belfast a week ago when a carefully sequenced series of announcements of political progress from British Prime Minister Tony Blair; his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern; and leaders of the two communities failed to calm concern over IRA weapons.

DUBLIN, Ireland - The Irish Republican Army was reported yesterday to have delivered a sharp rebuff to demands for its disarmament by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, in what was taken here as a significant setback to efforts to cement Northern Ireland's frail peace. Word of the IRA's action emerged on Irish state television, which quoted an unidentified senior source in the guerrilla movement as saying it would not accept Blair's "unrealistic demands." The statement reinforced remarks Friday by leaders of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, whose president, Gerry Adams, said republicans had been angered because Blair focused on the IRA, not on Protestant paramilitary organizations.

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair told Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams yesterday that Irish republicans had to abandon their "dual strategy" of combining paramilitary activity with participation in politics if peace in Northern Ireland is to be assured. "We still in Belfast and elsewhere have got pockets of real and totally unacceptable violence, we have got a situation where there is still a mix between the political and the paramilitary strategies of the republicans," Blair said. He made his remarks to ITV news after an hour-long crisis meeting at 10 Downing St. with Adams and other leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political wing, held demonstrations yesterday to protest the police raids of its parliamentary offices on Friday, while Protestant hard-liners continued to use the raids to attack Sinn Fein. The raids on the Sinn Fein offices of the province's power-sharing government came as relations between Protestant unionists, who favor maintaining ties with Britain, and republicans, mostly Catholics who favor closer ties with the Irish Republic, continued to worsen.

HOW RIGHT that Gerry Adams, leader of the Sinn Fein political party in the United Kingdom and Irish Republic and political leader of the IRA, visited Fidel Castro in Havana. How wrong of his friends to tell him not to go. Mr. Adams put the IRA squarely in the camp of international terrorism and revolution to procure weapons in the 1980s. As early as the mid-1970s, the IRA was getting weapons from Libya. It was reportedly supplied by the Palestine Liberation Organization, and by the Soviet Union through the PLO. It remains close to the Basque ETA. Mr. Adams' revolutionary cant in that period embarrassed American fund-raisers.

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.

THE IRISH Republican Army has some explaining to do. Colombian police arrested three Northern Irishmen, two solidly identified as convicted Provisional IRA terrorists, for teaching bomb-making to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Their clothes tested positive for several kinds of munitions and for cocaine. That is hardly consistent with the ceasefire the IRA maintains in the British Isles to qualify its partner Sinn Fein for political respectability. It suggests a collision course between friends of the IRA and the United States government, which is aiding Colombia's defense of its sovereignty.

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.