Labor union leaders called on workers across Northern Ireland to protest yesterday against Irish Republican Army (IRA) dissidents behind a surge of shootings that have killed three people and wounded four others.
Northern Ireland newspapers and leaders of the four major church denominations — Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican and Methodist — urged the entire community to denounce the killers with one voice and prevent a return to the sectarian bloodshed which wracked the UK province for 30 years
“End this madness,” urged a front-page editorial in the Belfast Telegraph alongside photographs of the three slain men: 48-year-old police Constable Stephen Carroll and two soldiers in the British Army’s Royal Engineers: Cengiz “Patrick” Azimkar, 21, and Mark Quinsey, 23.
The appeal came just hours after Catholic and Protestant leaders of Northern Ireland’s coalition government jointly pledged to crush IRA dissidents in an exceptional show of unity on Tuesday.
British and Irish ministers also held an emergency meeting at Hillsborough Castle in County Down on Tuesday evening, vowing that dissidents would “not have the power to stop the peace process.”
The Continuity IRA shot Carroll through the back of the head on Monday night as he sat in a patrol car. Another splinter group, the Real IRA, gunned down the two army engineers, and wounded two other soldiers and two pizza delivery men on Saturday night as Afghanistan-bound troops collected a final Northern Ireland meal at the entrance of their base.
Leaders of Northern Ireland’s 22-month-old coalition of British Protestants and Irish Catholics left for the US yesterday to seek increased US support for their peace process. They have twice canceled the start of their US tour, which was supposed to focus on defending and promoting US business investment in their land.
As they left yesterday, aides to First Minister Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness conceded that their trip now was likely to attract much greater US attention — but for all the wrong reasons, amid worries that the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 could collapse.
But the recent killings have already had the effect of bonding Robinson, long a bitter Protestant opponent of the IRA, and McGuinness, a longtime IRA commander, more closely than ever before.
They rarely appeared in public together before Tuesday, when they stood shoulder to shoulder with Northern Ireland police chief Hugh Orde and appealed for citizens shielding the IRA dissidents in their communities to identify them to police.
“These people are traitors to the island of Ireland, they have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island,” McGuinness said. “They don’t deserve to be supported by anyone.”
Within hours of that appeal, police raided homes in a Catholic district of Craigavon, southwest of Belfast, near the spot where Carroll was killed, and arrested a 17-year-old boy and 37-year-old man. They were being questioned yesterday at the police’s main interrogation center in Antrim, west of Belfast.
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