FACE TO FACE

By BARRY HILLENBRAND/BELFAST

It was no surprise last week when, just as historic talks began to try to dissolve the annealed hate that divides Northern Ireland, a 400-lb. bomb exploded in a largely Protestant town near Belfast. The hard men for whom terrorism has become a way of life were again trying to blow away the chance for peace. Nor was it a surprise that the Protestant politicians, who fear any change in their domination of the province, denounced the bombing as a Roman Catholic republican plot that made the talks impossible.

But it was a surprise when, one day after the explosion, the talks began anyway, bringing together for the first time the leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which has waged war to drive the British off the island of Ireland, and the main leaders of their bitter Protestant Unionist opponents. That the talks began at all was a triumph of patience, persistence and cleverness by the governments of Ireland, Britain and the U.S., which are shepherding the broader peace process.

It was also a measure of how much has changed in Northern Ireland over the past half a dozen years. Most important, the 1.6 million people of the province, Protestant and Catholic alike, have come to hate the war of hate and are demanding peace. Second, the terrorists have come to believe they can win more from talking than from killing. And finally, the huge parliamentary majority rolled up by Tony Blair and the Labour Party has stripped the recalcitrant Unionists of their veto over the efforts of the British government to change the status of its troubled province.

In the past the Unionists have been able simply to stonewall the peace process. But last week, there at the head of the Unionist delegation was David Trimble, a hot-tempered, frequently red-faced law lecturer who heads Northern Ireland's largest and most important Protestant party, the Ulster Unionist Party (U.U.P.).

For years Trimble, like many other Unionists, refused to sit down in the same room with Sinn Fein representatives. Once Trimble stormed out of a TV interview in the midst of a live broadcast because he was about to be electronically linked with a Sinn Fein member in another studio. But in August the British government declared that a new I.R.A. cease-fire was genuine and that Sinn Fein was thus qualified to join the political talks jointly sponsored by London and Dublin under the chairmanship of former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. Suddenly, Sept. 15, the date set for the start of a new round of talks, became the moment of truth for Trimble. Sinn Fein would join the talks, but would Trimble take his party in?

If Trimble's temperament and political background were any guide, the answer would clearly have been no. As a young lecturer in law at Queen's University in Belfast in the late '60s, Trimble joined a fringe political group Vanguard, that condemned the U.U.P., the party Trimble was later to head, for being insufficiently hard line. He flirted with other extremist groups before finally coming to terms with the U.U.P. and being elected to Parliament as one of its candidates in 1990. His rise to the top of the party was swift. He won the leadership slot in 1995, largely on the strength of the militant image he had acquired by marching at the head of a triumphalist Protestant parade that bullied its way through a besieged Catholic neighborhood. "We were in despair when he was elected," says a moderate in Trimble's party. "We thought all hope for peace and accommodation was gone."

But Trimble has changed. Once he became leader of the party, there was a concerted effort by Britain and the U.S. to erode his narrow provincialism by getting him to travel outside Ulster, a process that had worked well with Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein. For a man who once bragged he had never set foot outside the U.K., it was a heady experience. Trimble visited the U.S., long shunned by Unionists as the bastion of fervent I.R.A. support. He had coffee with President Bill Clinton and chatted with the sort of Congressmen he once considered the enemies of Unionism. Now Trimble's office hands out copies of the Congressional Record featuring a speech paying tribute to the Irish Protestant tradition in America. Its author: Ted Kennedy, the Irish republican's greatest champion in Congress. Trimble also traveled to South Africa with delegations of other parties from Northern Ireland for a conference on conflict resolution.

Trimble is still a staunch Unionist and profoundly leery of Sinn Fein. Before walking into the talks last week, he defiantly said he had come not to "negotiate with Sinn Fein but to confront them and to expose their fascist character." "Yet," says David Ervine, a senior official of the Progressive Unionist Party, who marched into talks with Trimble last week, "Trimble has come further than any Unionist leader in history." He has broken out of the siege mentality, which for years had Unionist leaders hiding behind banners proclaiming NO SURRENDER and refusing to consider any accommodation with the Catholic minority or with the Irish Republic to the south. "We are certainly going to address the views of those who consider themselves Irish and don't want to be part of the United Kingdom," says Trimble. "We have to respect their cultural identity and protect their civil rights. We are comfortable with that." But, of course, Trimble holds fast to the basic principle of Unionism: that Northern Ireland should remain part of the U.K.

Despite his firm belief that the I.R.A. cease-fire is a sham, Trimble recognized that the moral burden of continuing the peace process had fallen on him. "We could have stayed back and waited for the talks to collapse without us," says Trimble. "But then we would have been accused of blocking peace."

Trimble also knew that the popular political mood in Northern Ireland was running strongly in favor of all-inclusive peace talks. The failure of the I.R.A. cease-fire, which collapsed in February 1996, had profoundly depressed people. This summer sectarian tension once again ran high, and Northern Ireland teetered on the edge of what one of the senior members of Mitchell's team warned could have been "full-scale civil war." The I.R.A. cease-fire announced in July and the promise of peace talks in September again raised hopes. Says Christopher McGimpsey, a U.U.P. city councilor from Belfast: "We were hearing from the grass roots that we should enter talks."

Trimble also received a powerful shove through the negotiating gates from Blair. First, Blair warned Sinn Fein that if it wanted to have a say in the future of Northern Ireland, it would have to secure a cease-fire from the I.R.A. and agree to respect democratic principles. When it did just that, Blair turned his attention to Trimble's Unionists. "Some Unionists failed to understand that if we do not join the talks, London and Dublin could impose a political solution on us," says John Taylor, the deputy leader of Trimble's party. With that possibility staring him in the face, Trimble could hardly have said no to the talks.

Even after last week's bombing, Trimble arrived for the talks. "Two years ago," said Marjorie ("Mo") Mowlam, the tough-talking, no-nonsense British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, "it would not have been possible for Trimble to move forward after a bomb like that. Now Unionism wants its leaders to be talking." And in the North, that is surprising progress.