Battle for Hearts, Minds as N. Ireland Vote Nears

NEWTOWNARDS, Northern Ireland — Queen’s Hall shook with foot-stomping applause as the Rev. Ian Paisley beseeched Protestants to vote against a landmark peace agreement with Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic community in this week’s referendum on the accord.

Paisley, the leader of the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, told a crowd waving Union Jacks that the power-sharing accord would lead them “fast and furious” into the fold of the Irish Republic to the south, fulfilling the goal of the Irish Republican Army.

“You can’t enter common cause with Ulster’s ancient enemies,” Paisley railed.

At a Salvation Army hall in East Belfast, meanwhile last week, Progressive Unionist Party leader David Ervine argued that the accord would safeguard the union with Britain. He acknowledged that IRA prisoners would be released from jail and leaders of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, would govern alongside Protestants, but he pleaded for tolerance.

“I know it’s painful,” Ervine said. “We are going to have to work together.”

Throughout the six counties of a province long racked by sectarian violence, vigorous hearts-and-minds campaigns like these are continuing as pro-British Protestants battle among themselves over Friday’s vote on the peace deal struck between leaders of the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority last month.

Catholics have largely embraced the accord hammered out between the two sides with U.S. mediator George J. Mitchell and the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland, and their support is likely to ensure its passage by the required simple majority.

But to gain moral legitimacy and survive even tougher battles ahead, the agreement also needs the backing of a majority of Protestant voters, which is in doubt. Protestant support for the agreement has dropped from a euphoric high of 84% after the conclusion of the Good Friday deal to 56%, with about a third of Protestant voters still undecided, according to an Irish Times poll published Friday.

Bitter Campaigns

The Protestant campaigns have grown increasingly personal and bitter, with the opposing camps calling each other “cowards” and “traitors” and agreeing on just one point--that this is the most important political decision they will ever make.

The deal, expected to be approved by the Irish Republic in a separate referendum Friday, calls for changes in British and Irish law to ensure that the status of Northern Ireland can be decided only by its own people. Ireland would drop its constitutional claim to the six northern counties, which would remain in Britain unless a majority in Northern Ireland decides otherwise.

The Protestants are descendants of the English and Scots who settled in Northern Ireland centuries ago. They see themselves as British. While they are a majority in Northern Ireland, they would become a minority if the province were to join the Republic of Ireland.

Under the agreement, a 108-member legislature and 12-member Cabinet would be elected in June, with built-in guarantees that the Protestant majority cannot discriminate against the Catholic minority. The new assembly and Dublin-based Irish Parliament would form a North-South council, the first official body to coordinate policies across all of Ireland since the end of British rule in the south almost 80 years ago.

A Council of the Isles also would link the governments in Belfast, the provincial capital, and Dublin with new legislative assemblies being set up in Scotland and Wales.

Prisoners from paramilitary groups honoring a cease-fire would be released within two years. The political parties, meanwhile, agree to renounce violence and work for the decommissioning of weapons from their affiliated armed groups.

On the face of it, Catholic nationalists would seem to have made the greatest concessions in the agreement, which falls far short of the united Ireland that the IRA has been fighting for during most of this century. Instead, they agree to institutional links to Dublin while ensuring that, at least for the time being, Northern Ireland remains in Britain. Moreover, Sinn Fein has agreed to participate in a Northern Irish government.

And yet Protestants are most unhappy about the deal, which is designed to end their lock on power, give Catholics--and most likely Sinn Fein--a foothold in government and guarantee equal rights. Most of the unionist parties still view Sinn Fein as nothing more than a front for IRA terrorists.

Supporters of the agreement acknowledge that they have a harder job trying to sell the peace agreement than those urging a “no” vote. They say they are fighting a long-standing belief in Northern Ireland that what is good for one side must be bad for the other. By this logic, an agreement supported by Sinn Fein must be opposed by Protestants.

“Do not just judge this agreement by the reactions of your opponents and enemies,” Protestant negotiator David Adams urged a rally of the Ulster Democratic Party at Ulster Hall in downtown Belfast. “Make up your own minds. We have to have the self-confidence to look at the agreement on its own terms.”

The Protestants’ peace negotiating team was spearheaded by David Trimble, the leader of the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party. He has won the backing of most of his party’s rank and file, although seven of the 10 Ulster Unionist party members of British Parliament oppose the accord. One of his party’s members is calling for Trimble’s resignation.

Apologies Demanded

Opponents of the accord argue that the release of prisoners is immoral and that putting Sinn Fein in government sends the message that violence pays. They also object to the fact that Sinn Fein and the IRA have not apologized for the killings carried out during the past 30 years of violence.

“The Bible says it is the responsibility of the state to protect individuals and to use the sword to deal with lawbreakers,” Paisley said. “There is no forgiveness in the Bible without repentance.”

Opponents call President Clinton’s support of the agreement “intervention” and the British government’s promise of $250 million in economic aid to Northern Ireland “an indecent proposal” to buy votes. Many Protestants feel abandoned by Britain, which they say no longer wants them in the union.

At the same time, they are bound by the fears and, in some cases, hatreds that have defined Northern Ireland for generations. They say they cannot trust Sinn Fein and the IRA to abandon the use of violence and cannot imagine a peace they have never known.

“There will never be peace,” 21-year-old Robert Moore said matter-of-factly in a vegetable shop on Shankill Road in the heart of Protestant Belfast. Moore was working in the store five years ago when the IRA blew up a fish-and-chip shop next door, killing nine people.

“The IRA will just put a new initial in front of its name. This whole thing is just a way to get their prisoners out of jail,” Moore said.

But Alan McBride, whose wife died in that blast, has thrown his support behind the accord, as have a number of other families of victims of IRA violence. “I don’t want anyone else to go through what I have gone through,” McBride said on Ulster TV.

New Thinking Urged

The “yes” campaigners stand before large crowds of working-class men in baseball caps and gold earrings, and white-haired women in bifocals and rubber-soled shoes, arguing through clouds of cigarette smoke for a new way of thinking.

They say that the days of armed struggle are ending, that a prisoner release is an inevitable part of conflict resolution and that the Catholics have a right to aspire to unity with the Irish Republic so long as they pursue that goal democratically.

“By recognizing [Sinn Fein leader] Gerry Adams, I am not a weaker man, I am a stronger man,” Ervine told his audience at the Salvation Army hall. “He’ll be a minority in a majority Unionist government. He becomes a servant of the people of Northern Ireland. I know it’s hard to imagine, but it’s not harder than to imagine me as a servant of Catholics.”

This view is as revolutionary in Belfast now as the idea of a cease-fire was five years ago, but Ervine promised it would seem perfectly ordinary five years hence. Northern Ireland will have its integrated assembly, he predicted, and peace will bring economic recovery to the province.

Average Protestants are skeptical. The prevailing feeling even among supporters is not that this is such a wonderful agreement but that it is the best they are likely to get--and their only shot for ending the violence.

“It’s a chance,” said the owner of a flower shop on Shankill Road who would not give her name. “I’ve grown up with ‘the Troubles.’ I am 35 and it’s all I’ve ever known. This is for my two children.”