Ulster

The return of the Protestant marching season finds Northern Ireland more troubled than ever.The three-track talks involving political parties that Britain and Ireland promoted last year are virtually dead. A new generation of Protestant terrorists eluding British attempts at suppression has revived the truism of two decades ago that they are meaner, deadlier, more intractable than the IRA.The IRA has had more success than ever in causing mayhem in England, particularly car-bombings in the London financial district.

LONDON -- For the first time since the partition of Ireland more than 70 years ago, top officials of the Irish Republic have sat down at a negotiating table with leaders of the predominantly Protestant Unionist parties of Northern Ireland.At issue in the talks, which were also attended by British officials and leaders of other parties from the North, is the political future of the troubled province."I very much hope that everyone will prove up to the magnitude of the occasion and proceed in a sensible and workmanlike way," said Sir Patrick Mayhew, Britain's minister in charge of Northern Ireland.

Gainesville, Florida. -- Yes, St. Patrick, there is an I.R.A. -- An Irish Republican Army which masquerades murder for patriotism your old island. Irish nationalism makes for good culture but poor politics. Clinging to the old sod as one Ireland, when it's two, twists a warm Irish welcome into the cold, hard steel of a gun barrel.What went wrong? How is it that someone named O'Rourke or O'Reilly can feel and be more Irish living in New York, Sydney or South London than a lad named Douglas, Graham or Bell living in Belfast?

Several efforts to negotiate a new regime for Northern Ireland came to nothing in the 1970s. The present talks involving four of the five vote-getting parties of the province and the governments of Ireland and Britain carry no greater promise of success. The sticking-points then still stick. But the talks, chaired by a retired Australian judge and titular chief of state now an ambassador, do bring hope. They constitute the first such endeavor since 1976. That is progress in itself.The expressed aim is to find a regime for limited autonomy of the province which the British government would grant.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- For the first time in 17 years, leaders of Ulster's feuding unionist and republican traditions will open talks today on a new political future for the strife-torn province.Over the next 10 weeks, they will try to end the sectarian violence that has left 3,000 dead over the past two decades of "The Troubles."Their difficult quest: to find a formula for the peaceful, local government of Northern Ireland.The province has been controlled by the British Parliament since the provincial legislature at Stormount was abolished in 1972 in the face of unionist (Protestant)

At first blush, the achievement of Britain's secretary for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, is not huge. Over 16 months of preliminary talks, he persuaded all but one of the significant political parties of the province to meet in a single room and talk about forming a provincial regime. No agenda is agreed upon and no predictions of success are ventured. But this will be the first such forum since 1975, and that is something.What has happened is that the Ulster Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party, representing most of the Protestant majority, agreed to talks they previously shunned.

LONDON -- The people of Northern Ireland were urged yesterday to "spew out the men and women of violence" as three Roman Catholic victims of the province's sectarian violence were buried and the politicians prepared for all-party peace talks.The victims -- two teen-age girls and a man in his 20s -- were shot in a candy store by a hooded gunman Thursday night in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. The Protestant Action Force, which police believe may have been conducting a reign of terror for the past 15 months, said it carried out the slayings.

Sag Harbor, New York."THE BUCK Stops Here,'' said the little sign on the desk of President Harry S Truman. President Bush should get one that says, ''The Buck Starts Here.''The buck now stops here, in Sag Harbor, this village of 3,000 people. The state of New York, through Gov. Mario Cuomo, announced last week that it intended to cut this year's school aid to the village by $182,141 -- that's out of total annual aid of $949,787. The cut amounts to 20 percent.This is the same Governor Cuomo who was complaining two months ago about the evils of what he called ''fend-for-yourself federalism that forces the states to go it alone.