HOMEMADE BOMB DEVASTATES N. IRELAND INN : IRA DENIES INVOLVEMENT IN INJURY EXPLOSION.

Byline: Shawn Pogatchnik Associated Press 

A car bomb ravaged a country hotel Sunday soon after it was evacuated, knocking hotel guests to the pavement and capping a week of rioting that threatens to transform Northern Ireland's uneasy peace into a memory.

The Irish Republican Army denied Sunday that it planted the bomb that blasted The Killyhevlin Hotel, a social hub for this lakeside town.

The hotel was packed with a Catholic wedding party, bar guests, tourists and fishermen when a caller warned hotel staff there was a bomb in a car parked outside.

Police said an Isuzu Trooper, stolen 11 days ago in Dublin, contained 1,200 pounds of homemade explosives. They praised hotel staff for evacuating 250 guests - some straight off the dance floor - to a back parking lot before the bomb tore apart the building's front 25 minutes later.

Scores were treated for shock; only three people were slightly injured.

The bomb - the first in Northern Ireland since the Irish Republican Army stopped its violent campaign against British rule in 1994 - crowned the worst week of rioting seen here in a generation.

Violence erupted July 7 when police blocked members of the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's dominant Protestant fraternal group, from marching through a Catholic part of Portadown, a town 25 miles southwest of Belfast.

The Orangemen stood their ground, and militant Protestants subjected Northern Ireland to four days of rioting.

Since Thursday, when police conceded defeat and allowed the march through the Catholic area, Catholic fury has spilled onto the streets.

Police and soldiers spent a third night Saturday repelling mobs of Catholics who hurled gasoline bombs, bricks and rocks at them in Belfast and Londonderry,

the province's second-largest and predominantly Catholic town where Northern Ireland's ``troubles'' began with similar scenes in 1969.

Sunday's hotel bombing reinforced the fear that Northern Ireland is sliding back into murder and grief, a past Enniskillen residents vividly remember. In 1987, an IRA bomb killed 11 Protestants as they commemorated the dead from two world wars.

Despite the IRA's decision to end its cease-fire in February by bombing London, Enniskillen residents said Sunday they hadn't been mentally prepared for a bomb here.

``This whole (peace) process is very, very much off the rails, and only a miracle's going to save it in the short term,'' said veteran journalist Eamonn Mallie. Trust among the key players - the north's largest pro-British Protestant and Irish Catholic parties, and the British and Irish governments - has evaporated, he said.

And the IRA's paramilitary enemies, gangs loyal to Britain from militant Protestant areas, are threatening to resume killing Catholics. The two main loyalist groups called a cease-fire in October 1994.

``I think we're on our way to hell and back,'' said David Ervine, a politician linked to the outlawed, paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. ``I don't know how it can be retrieved.''

The IRA-allied Sinn Fein party, which throughout the 17-month IRA truce pleaded in vain to start peace talks with the province's Protestant leaders, mobilized several thousand marchers Sunday in west Belfast.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams told the crowd that peace had been squandered by Protestant demands that the IRA disarm. To cheers, Adams suggested the past week's events had demonstrated ``why the IRA said it will not surrender its weapons.''

The hotel bomb has split public opinion in Enniskillen, with many Protestant residents certain the IRA did it.

``People kidded themselves about the peace. They couldn't see the truth about the IRA,'' said Jim Dixon, 58, who suffered horrific injuries and lost several close friends in the 1987 bombing.

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PHOTO The Killyhelvlin Hotel was damaged by a car bomb Sund ay as tensions in Northern Ireland escalated.

Associated Press