World

Protestant Leader Sends Out SOS

June 8, 2001 / 10:10 AM EDT / AP

Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said Tuesday that his Protestant party, an essential player in Northern Ireland's peace accord, was being undermined by extremists and needed support now from the British government.

Trimble made his appeal before leading a party delegation to London to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair. The British prime minister is expected to hold talks in Northern Ireland next week aimed at salvaging the joint Catholic-Protestant administration that Trimble leads.

A key unresolved issue is when, if ever, the Irish Republican Army will start scrapping its weapons.

Blair's Labor Party won re-election by a landslide in last Thursday's parliamentary elections, but voting the same day in Northern Ireland produced unprecedented gains for the opposite poles of opinion: the uncompromising Democratic Unionists on the Protestant side, the IRA-linked Sinn Fein on the Catholic side.

Trimble's party maintained a narrow lead among Protestants in parliamentary results, echoed in ballot counts that were continuing Tuesday for seats on Northern Ireland's 26 town councils.

With most of the council races decided, Ulster Unionists had won 135 compared to the Democratic Unionists' 119. On the Catholic side, the moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party had 95 seats compared to Sinn Fein's 92.

But some of the Ulster Unionists' biggest vote-winners have been critics of Trimble's leadership. That rift, combined with an unprecedented rise in Democratic Unionist support, increases the chances that Trimble could be ousted June 23 at the next Ulster Unionist meeting.

Trimble said the reason for growing Protestant hostility was simple: The Good Friday accord of 1998 envisioned that the IRA should disarm in exchange for Sinn Fein's place in the power-sharing government, yet he had been in government alongside Sinn Fein for the past year without a single IRA weapon being scrapped.

"The Ulster Unionists are the party on which this whole process depends. We've always been the linchpin on this situation, and perhaps we've been taken for granted," Trimble said.

He said many voters were turning to Gerry Adams' Sinn Fein or Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists because the British government had "appeased the extremes, particularly in the form of Mr. Adams and Sinn Fein, who have been quite unreasonable in the approach they have been taking."

Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness said he wanted Trimble to remain as Ulster Unionist leader — but blamed him for creating his own woes.

McGuinness, a former IRA commander who is education minister in the Trimble-led coalition, said Trimble had spent too much of the past three years criticizing parts of the 1998 pact instead of embracing it.

"His failure to make it absolutely clear there can be no renegotiation of the Good Friday agreement has contributed to the crisis within unionism," McGuinness said.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein activists crowded Belfast City Hall on Tuesday to atch the final recounts for the capital's council race.

Sinn Fein, which has long been strong in the city's growing Catholic districts, was hoping to win more seats than the Ulster Unionists and lay claim to the mayor's post for the first time in history.