U.S. envoy joins NI peace effort

Haass will visit Dublin and Belfast

DUBLIN, Ireland -- U.S. special envoy Richard Haass has arrived in Ireland to boost stalled peace efforts as well investigate alleged Irish Republican Army links with Colombian rebels.

U.S. President George W. Bush's envoy will then travel to Belfast where he will discuss the standoff at Holy Cross Primary School, scene of recent sectarian hatred directed at children.

Haass will meet Irish government leaders and the republican political party Sinn Fein on Tuesday. On the agenda will be questions about the arrest of three suspect IRA members in Colombia earlier in the year.

The arrests have fuelled the pro-British, Protestant Ulster Unionist Party's opposition to continued co-operation withSinn Fein, as well as suspicions that the IRA might be prepared to abandon its 1997 cease-fire.

The situation has been worsened by Cuba repeating the claim that the three men were Sinn Fein's Havana-based representatives for Latin America.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, who is to visit Cuba, has tried to distance the party from the potentially embarrassing connection.

The possible link has forced some of the political party's supporters in the U.S. Congress to call on Adams to cancel his Cuba trip.

Bush had been "extremely disturbed" about the arrests, Haass said after a meeting in London on Monday.

"The United States, as you all know, has important national interest in Columbia," he told the UK's Press Association.

"We have got hundreds of Americans on the ground there. We have put in hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to help that country battle the insurrection, drug trafficking and so forth."

He added: "My concerns about those contacts are real."

The Ulster Unionists said they would ask Haass to recommend a renewed fund-raising ban on Sinn Fein in the U.S..

The Ulster Unionists are threatening to withdraw from the Northern Ireland government, forcing its collapse or suspension, unless the IRA starts to scrap weapons as set out under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday accord.

Senior Ulster Unionist Lord Taylor of Kilclooney said in an article in the Irish Times newspaper that Northern Ireland was facing a "critical moment."

The Stormont Assembly member added, that it was "simply impossible" to continue to have Sinn Fein ministers in government while republicans remained active in violent operations.

He said the IRA must learn from the ethnic Albanian rebels in Macedonia, who he said, recognised that they could not hold onto their arms as well as take up their places in a democratic institution.

Sectarian intransigence reached new levels last week when Protestants demonstrated against Catholic parents taking their girls to Holy Cross Primary School along Ardoyne Road.

A blast bomb was thrown at police trying to keep the two sides apart, and abuse was hurled at the children, some as young as four years old.

Adams was due to meet Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern on Tuesday to discuss the issue.

Protestants turn their backs on Catholics doing the school-run through the Ardoyn Road

Haass has said the trauma of the Holy Cross protests in north Belfast was deeply felt on the other side of the Atlantic.

"The pictures are shown in the United States," he told PA.

"They have an enormous impact. Anyone who has small children understands just how wrong it is for children of any age, of any nationality, to be caught up in politics in this way."

He added that he was hopeful of keeping the peace process alive.

"On the table we have extraordinary proposals that I think are obviously in both parties' interests so I think it is too early to be talking about pessimism."