BELFAST, Northern Ireland, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- An extraordinary 11th-hour political deal saved Northern Ireland's power-sharing local government and the Good Friday Peace Process on Tuesday -- for the moment.
But David Trimble, who is returning to his old position as first minister of the joint Protestant-Catholic Executive, has only a year and a half to show lasting results to his increasingly skeptical Protestant unionist constituency.
The Northern Ireland Assembly Tuesday elected Trimble back to his old position as first minister by 70 votes to 29.
But Trimble needed the support of the small Alliance Party through a parliamentary maneuver to give him a majority of Protestant community votes by 31 to 29. He had failed to win that crucial community majority in an earlier vote on Friday, four days before.
Trimble's foes among hard-line unionists were furious at the last minute deal with the Alliance. There were bitter scuffles in the Assembly chamber at Stormont Castle, north of Belfast, when the result was announced. And the Rev. Ian Paisley, firebrand leader of Northern Ireland's Protestant extremists for more than 30 years, vowed that Trimble would soon face voters' vengeance at the polls.
Trimble still enjoys significant grassroots Protestant support. But he appears to be in a clear minority in his own community. His support at best is around half of his own Ulster Unionist Party and Paisley's Democratic Unionists are roughly their equal in voting support. That gives Trimble only around 25 percent support among the 900,000 Protestants who are the majortiy of Northern Ireland's 1.5 million people.
Trimble therefore has to prove in the coming months that he can defend the interests of his own community as he leads the Power-Sharing Executive. In particular, Protestants remain skeptical about the Catholic nationalist paramilitary Irish Republican Army's commitment to decommission its weapons, putting them out of action.
The IRA last month announced that three and half years after its political wing Sinn Fein signed the Good Friday Agreement, it was finally taking the first step of putting its guns beyond use.
The IRA's move was widely expected to free the way for Trimble to return to his position as first minister with all the Protestant political support he needed. But his rejection Friday and his need for Alliance support Tuesday showed that his eroding support in his own community could prove to be a potentially fatal wobble for the revived peace process.
The traditionally non-sectarian Alliance Party draws members from both the Catholic and Protestant communities. It agreed to redesignate several of its Assembly members as unionists to give Trimble the support he needed. The maneuver worked in tactical terms. But it outraged many Protestants and probably added to Trimble's problems of eroding support in his own power base.
Alliance leader David Ford yielded to strong pressure from the British and Irish governments to bail out Trimble. But he did not appear happy to do it. He said Saturday: "There are major issues of principle for a party which has for 30 years been the only cross-community party drawing support across the community."
Unionist parties represent 66 percent of Northern Ireland's population who wish to remain British, but these parties are deeply split about the means. Many disagree with the strategy of power sharing with Sinn Fein, remembering that the IRA was responsible for nearly 2,000 deaths in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years. That would be the proportional equivalent of 360,000 Americans killed by guerrilla or terrorist attacks over the past 30 years.
Yet a majority 70 percent of the combined Protestant and Catholic voters supported sharing in the referendum that followed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
There is significant sectarian opposition to the restoration of power-sharing among Catholic republican paramilitaries as well. The Real IRA, an IRA spin-off responsible for the terrorist murder of more than 30 people in the town of Omagh by a car bomb a few years ago, sees decommissioning of IRA weapons as a betrayal of traditional republican principles.
They made their own position clear on Saturday when they set off a bomb in the British city of Birmingham, though it failed to inflict any casualties.
Tuesday was also the first working day for Northern Ireland's new Police Service, which replaced the 79-year-old Royal Ulster Constabulary. The RUC was 94 percent Protestant and had become deeply distrusted within the Catholic community. But it had lost 300 officers to terrorist violence and was seen by Protestants largely as their protector. Trimble's failure to prevent its erosion and replacement was major reason for his slide in support among unionists.
The British and Irish governments hope that the new Police Service will be 50 percent Protestant and 50 percent Catholic and that it will prove acceptable, credible and trusted in both communities. But that still remains an aspiration rather than an established achievement.
Trimble's success as first minister and his ability to reclaim support in his own Protestant community could largely hinge on how successful the new Police Service proves to be. It has a year and half at the most until the scheduled 2003 local eleections for the Assembly to produce results.
