Pressures mount to get N. Ireland peace on track

Last Tuesday, at approximately the same time police in a remote corner of County Donegal found the body of an Irish rebel turned British spy, Irish and British diplomats were putting the finishing touches on the ultimatum their prime ministers would deliver to the parties in Northern Ireland two days later.

At the same time, about 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., the biggest Protestant unionist party was mounting a charm offensive. The Democratic Unionists were trying to explain why, eight years after the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to have ended Europe's most intractable conflict, and eight months after the Irish Republican Army said its war was over, they still refuse to share power with Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing.

The settings couldn't have been more different: a derelict cottage, where police found the body of Denis Donaldson, the onetime IRA commander and longtime Sinn Fein figure who admitted last December that he had been a spy for British intelligence for more than 20 years; the staid, hushed offices in Dublin and London, where the team of diplomats work more closely than ever before; and Senator Edward M. Kennedy's private retreat in the Capitol, where Peter Robinson, the deputy leader of the Democratic Unionists, tried to convince his American hosts that the IRA remained a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Despite the different settings, all three events were inextricably intertwined as the British, Irish, and American governments, once again, try to figure a way out of the morass that is post-conflict Northern Ireland.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, met in Armagh, the ecclesiastical seat for both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches on the island of Ireland, to announce that they would give the parties until Nov. 24 to revive the power-sharing local government. That assembly, the cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, was suspended in 2002 when unionists, who want to maintain the union with the United Kingdom, walked out after Donaldson and two other men were charged with spying for the IRA at Stormont, the parliament building where Donaldson ran Sinn Fein's offices.

But those charges were dropped four months ago, and Donaldson dropped a bombshell days later when he appeared alongside Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and admitted he had been spying after all -- for the British. Donaldson was expelled from Sinn Fein and went into self-imposed exile in the wilds of Donegal, living in a ramshackle cottage without electricity or running water, in what some of his former comrades saw as a monastic-like penance.

In July, the IRA, facing pressure over its continued involvement in violence and criminality, declared its armed campaign over and said it would use only peaceful means to bring about the republican goal of a united Ireland. International monitors later confirmed that the IRA had destroyed its arsenal.

Still, the Democratic Unionists led by the Protestant fundamentalist Rev. Ian Paisley, refuse to share power, saying they aren't convinced the IRA is out of business. Donaldson's killing provided what Paisley considers a legitimate reservation, and what others less charitably see as a convenient excuse, to refuse to do a deal with Sinn Fein.

Officials in Ireland's national police force said they do not believe the IRA would order Donaldson's killing, because of the political damage it would do its cause. But detectives hunting for Donaldson's killers are leaning toward the theory that former or current IRA members operating without the organization's blessing killed him with shotgun blasts.

In setting a deadline, Blair and Ahern borrowed a page from the playbook of George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader from Maine who chaired the negotiations that led to the 1998 agreement. Frustrated after years of bickering, Mitchell gave the parties a deadline to reach a deal or walk away, saying that without such an incentive the parties would revert to form and simply talk at rather than to each other.

The fact that the Democratic Unionists, led by an 80-year-old preacher who a decade ago dismissed Mitchell as a biased outsider from ''the Kennedy stable of the Boston lobby of republicanism," visited Kennedy on Capitol Hill last week shows just how dramatically things have changed. But they are finding little support for delaying the resumption of power-sharing.

Last year, angered over the IRA's alleged involvement in a $50 million bank heist and its admitted involvement in the slaying of a Belfast forklift driver named Robert McCartney, Kennedy shunned Adams and demanded that the IRA end its violence. Now, Kennedy says the IRA has kept its part of the bargain and that it's time for the Democratic Unionists to share power with Sinn Fein.

If the government is restored, Paisley would be its first minister, while Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, and more significantly a former IRA chief of staff, would be deputy first minister -- something the Paisleyites find repulsive.

In the coming months, Sinn Fein will be under pressure to accept the legitimacy of the police force in Northern Ireland, but once that happens, as is expected, most pressure will be on Paisley.

Blair strongly hinted that if Paisley refuses to reach an agreement by Nov. 24, the British and Irish governments would chart a new way forward that gives the Irish government a greater say in Northern Ireland, a prospect that Paisley dreads as much as shaking hands with McGuinness.

Responding to the Blair-Ahern ultimatum, Paisley celebrated his birthday Thursday by insisting he would not be bullied into a deal.

But, as one British diplomat put it, if Paisley is determined to call Blair's bluff, the reverend might want to remember that as a vice-averse Free Presbyterian he is not supposed to gamble.