Trimble opens the door.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Good Friday pact of 1998 between Northern Ireland's Protestants and Catholics was a true road map to peace between the longtime rival factions. But the road has been a bumpy one over the past year.

That's why it was heartening to hear David Trimble, leader of Northern Ireland's largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, call for a resumption of the power-sharing arrangement between the two sides. Trimble said power-sharing could resume if the Irish Republican Army, the most prominent Catholic faction in Northern Ireland, would commit to ceasing all hostile activity and to disarmament, as called for in the Good Friday accords.

But then the agreement hit a snag. Trimble and the Ulster Unionists said the IRA and its political arm, Sinn Fein, didn't go far enough in its pledge to disarm. The problem, as in the past, centered on the IRA's secretiveness in destroying its weapons. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, rightly, has set an election date of Nov. 26 for filling the seats in Northern Ireland's National Assembly.

Trimble's plea for a "full and final" settlement between Sinn Fein and the Protestants represents, at minimum, a symbolic gesture of good will. Such symbols are desperately needed to at last bring the 30-plus-year-old conflict to an end. It was the Protestants who broke off the power-sharing arrangement, and it's appropriate that they should propose its resumption. But for that to occur, the IRA must let John de Chastelain, the Canadian minister in charge of the arms decommissioning commission, to personally verify the precise number of arms the IRA has decommissioned.

Trimble delivered his original message of cooperation to his party's annual conference in Belfast. Its significance is found not only in the content of the message, but in the flexibility it showed. He told his fellow Protestants that they must be willing to resume power-sharing with Sinn Fein even before the IRA completes its disarmament.

"We did not say that every jot and tittle must be completed before we proceed," Trimble told the conference. "Neither the (British) government's formula, nor ours, say that everything must be done first. Rather, both envisage a sense that paramilitarism is coming to an end soon."

The unmistakable demarcation line between the two sides is simple, but seemingly irreconcilable: The Protestants want Northern Ireland to remain part of Great Britain. The Catholics want the province to be rejoined with the independent - and predominantly Catholic - Republic of Ireland to the south. Power-sharing is the best, perhaps the only, attainable compromise.

If the conflict were limited to the IRA and the major Protestant groups, peace would likely be more easily reached. Sadly, outlaw factions on both sides keep carrying out violent attacks. That must stop, and it will take immense pressure from both Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists for that to occur.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world must hope for Northern Ireland to find a permanent - truly permanent - peace.