Britain's senior official in Northern Ireland warned Wednesday that key achievements of peacemaking were in jeopardy as negotiations to salvage the territory's Catholic-Protestant government were teetering «on the edge» of success or failure, AP reported. «If we succeed with this, we will secure all of the achievements of the peace process. If we fail with this, we will put many of them at risk,» said Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, who has helped broker nine days and nights of negotiations striving to repair the unraveling Belfast administration. The British Protestant side of the 2½-year-old coalition remains badly divided over a proposed compromise deal on the table. The Irish Catholics of Sinn Fein are reserving the right to withdraw _ collapsing the core institution of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord _ unless the Protestants agree soon to create a new Justice Department that would receive powers from Britain in May. The political stalemate is being fought against a backdrop of sporadic violence by Irish Republican Army dissidents, who seek to undermine power-sharing and the IRA truce. Their chief immediate goal is to deter Catholic civilians from supporting the Northern Ireland police force. In the latest trouble, a grenade blast damaged the perimeter fence of a Belfast police station Wednesday while, across the border in the Republic of Ireland, police stopped a car containing four suspected IRA dissidents. They arrested the 49-year-old driver and seized a firearm, but the other three escaped on foot. Police mounted road checkpoints on both sides of the border in hopes of intercepting the trio. Power-sharing was supposed to consign to history a conflict that has claimed 3,700 lives since the late 1960s. Peace has prevailed thanks to 1990s cease-fires and more recent disarmament by the province's major outlawed groups. But the aim of uniting Northern Ireland's 1.7 million residents through a partnership government has proved a titanic struggle. -- SPA
