PEACE PACT GIVES IRISH HOPE, WORRY.

Byline: Ray Moseley Chicago Tribune 

The historic Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland may prove as difficult to implement as the one between Israel and the Palestinians.

After 30 years of warfare, there is a legacy of bitterness and mistrust between the principal Protestant and Catholic factions that will not easily be overcome and which could lead to trouble at various stages.

The agreement provides for a return to self-government in Northern Ireland after 26 years of direct rule from London, a sharing of power by Protestants and Catholics, an end to violence by the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitary groups and new constitutional links between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

It will be put to a referendum in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic on May 22, and implementation should start with elections to a new legislative assembly in late June. Then the likely troubles may surface.

David Trimble, leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, will find himself called upon to sit in the same legislative assembly with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and possibly in government executive bodies, and that will be a hard pill to swallow.

Throughout the peace negotiations, Trimble and his followers refused to sit in the same room with representatives of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

The depth of Trimble's personal feeling was illustrated earlier this year when extremist Protestant and Catholic groups trying to wreck the peace process started a campaign of murder.

As Adams tells it, he approached Trimble and said: ``Look, your people are being killed and our people are being killed. We need to talk.''

He said Trimble replied: ``I don't talk to f------ murderers,'' and walked away.

Trimble's bitterness boiled over again Friday, after the peace agreement was reached, when he urged reporters to ask Adams ``whether his dirty little squalid terrorist war is over.''

It was because of incidents such as these that Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of the Irish Republic warned political leaders and ordinary citizens of Northern Ireland alike that true peace will depend on their willingness to forego the hatreds of the past and extend a hand of friendship and reconciliation to one another.

Throughout the six-county province, which holds the graves of more than 3,200 people killed in the conflict and harbors memories of 30,000 wounded, the task of reconciling Protestant and Catholic communities will undoubtedly take years.

Even as the peace talks came to a conclusion on Friday, workmen were erecting a new wall between Protestants and Catholics in a neighborhood of Belfast that has been the scene of frequent sectarian clashes in recent months. The physical walls of separation will remain for some time, and the walls in the minds of those who have lived on hatred may last even longer.

The advent of the annual marching season in Northern Ireland always brings a rise in tensions between the two communities, and the first of the marches by Protestants is scheduled for Monday in Belfast. Authorities have rerouted it to avoid the Catholic Ormeau Road, but marches will get under way in earnest in June and July and keeping tempers in check on both sides will present a challenge to the government.

There is little doubt the vast majority of Northern Ireland's people, Catholic and Protestant alike, will be euphoric over the agreement. There is a huge war weariness in the province. But worries will focus on dissident politicians and extremist groups that stayed out of the peace process.

In the months ahead, the extremists are expected to try to wreck the agreement through violence. But they lack the firepower of the IRA and the main Protestant paramilitary groups, and police say they are confident of being able to contain renewed violence, even if they cannot stop it completely.

On the Protestant side, there is the Loyalist Volunteer Force whose leader, Billy Wright, was murdered in the Maze Prison earlier this year. Among Catholics, there is both the Irish National Liberation Army and the Continuity IRA. The INLA has been around for years, but Continuity IRA is composed principally of those who have left the IRA and Sinn Fein in recent months because they believe the two organizations have abandoned the fight for a united Ireland.

Continuity IRA accused the mainstream IRA earlier this week of destroying a bomb it intended to transport from the Irish Republic to a target in Northern Ireland. A senior member of the breakaway group told the Irish Times that members of the IRA were ``policing'' the border area to thwart their attacks.