By IPS Correspondents
BELFAST, Mar 18 1999 (IPS)

The troubled peace process in Northern Ireland has been snarled again by brutal murders and politicans are struggling to find a way forward.

Thousands of mourners lined the streets of Lurgan Thursday for the funeral of a Roman Catholic lawyer blown up in her car three days earlier by Protestant guerrillas.

The coffin holding the body of Rosemary Nelson was carried through the streets by family members, while several thousand Catholics followed the cortege in silence.

On Wednesday, the St. Patrick’s Day Irish national holiday, gunmen shot and killed Frank Curry – a former member of the outlawed Red Hand Commando, a Protestant guerrilla group. The Red Hand guerrillas attributed his killing to another protestant group the Ulster Volunteer Force with whom they have been feuding.

In Washington, meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s top politicians – First Minister David Trimble, a Protestant, and Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein – met separately with President Bill Clinton and then sat down together to discuss prospects of working together in government.

Progress in the peace accord, signed on Good Friday last year, has been stalled for months.

The Protestant Ulster Unionist party, and Catholic Sinn Fein have struggled to find a way around Sinn Fein entering a power-sharing executive while their paramilitary associates in the Irish Republican Army have not yet agreed to dump their weapons.

The disposal of terrorist arms is at the heart of the crisis.

The Unionists and other Protestant parties read the agreement drawn up between most parties in Northern Ireland as requiring the “decommissioning” of weapons by the IRA and other armed guerrilla groups. Sinn Fein argues that there is no explicit linkage in the agreement between the start of that decommissioning and the creation of the executive.

The Ulster Unionists insist that there is no parity between the two positions. The IRA’s refusal to ditch weapons is not equal in principle to their refusal to establish a government which includes ministers linked to Private armies.

Sinn Fein, on the other hand, insists that it is not answerable for the IRA and is obliged by the agreement only to use influence to bring about disarmament.

The Catholic leadership says the only real hope of disarmament is for politics to be productive; the executive should be established now, and disarmament may follow.

The deadline imposed by the British government for resolution of this problem and the creation of the executive is Good Friday of this year – April 2 – the symbolically important anniversary of the original agreement.

President Clinton and former US Senator George Mitchell, who had chaired the inter party talks in Northern Ireland, called on all sides to recover some of the spirit of accord that made agreement possible last year.

Clinton told Trimble and Adams that all parties “must lift their sights above the short-term difficulties.

“They must see that distant horizon when children will grow up in an Ireland trouble-free and not even remember how it used to be.”to , but the White House clearly

The danger now is that the political agreement will collapse at the end of this month, according to political analysts.

The underlying sectarian tension in Northern Ireland actually is getting worse, as evidenced by this weeks killings, analysts say.

With summer approaching, so is Northern Ireland’s “marching season” when thousands of Protestants parade through cities and towns to celebrate the defeat 400 years ago of the then ruling Catholic forces.

The Catholics find the parades offensive, and in some areas have raised protests against them. The murdered lawyer Rosemary Nelson, was an adviser to a Catholic residents protest group opposing a parade from Drumcree Church outside the town of Portadown.

Every July there is widespread violence sparked by this one parade and the protests against it. This year, there is a danger that this violence will be exacerbated by the failure of the political peace process.

The power of the process to date has been that it has produced cease fires by Republican and Loyalist groups, renewed political negotiation and the creation of an assembly and a plan to devolve power to it from Britain.

Those who wanted the political process to work, had to keep their violent allies in check. If politics fails, then there is a danger that no argument will prevail against those who want to resume armed campaigns.

Analysts believed that extrimists may want to avenge the killings of this week, knowing that there will be no political price to pay for doing so.

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