Sinn Fein wins Belfast mayor's post for first time

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The IRA-linked Sinn Fein party won the post of Belfast mayor for the first time Wednesday, another important step away from its terrorist past and toward a mainstream political future.

Furious Protestant politicians walked out of Belfast City Council after the election of Sinn Fein candidate Alex Maskey, a former Irish Republican Army prisoner who nearly died in an assassination attempt 15 years ago. He became the city's second Roman Catholic mayor after two centuries of Protestant dominance.

"This is a disgraceful decision, rewarding an organization which has been involved in the destruction of Belfast over the past 30 years," said a losing Protestant candidate, Chris McGimpsey.

Maskey, 50, prevailed thanks to the council's most compromise-minded party, Alliance, whose three members backed Sinn Fein, despite expressing reservations about continued IRA violence. Maskey received 26 votes from the 51-member council, while the Protestant camp -- certain beforehand it would lose -- split its 25 votes between two candidates.

Alliance is the only cross-community party in a council otherwise divided into two diametrically opposed camps: 25 British Protestants and 23 Irish Catholics.

'Holding noses'

In previous years Alliance refused to back Maskey for the annually elected and officially neutral post. But before the vote councilman David Alderdice said all three Alliance councilmen were "prepared to hold our noses and swallow for the sake of the peace process."

Rhetorical battles between the two council blocs have long centered on the growing involvement of Sinn Fein, which boycotted Northern Ireland elections until the early 1980s.

Maskey, a former amateur boxer, was interned as an IRA suspect twice in the 1970s and emerged from prison as a favorite target for Protestant extremists. He was shot in the stomach at his home in 1987, and dodged other attempts. Gunmen killed a friend installing security equipment at his home in 1993.

After becoming Sinn Fein's first elected councilman in 1983, Maskey endured several years of attempted isolation. Protestant politicians either bolted from the council's red-leathered benches as he spoke or drowned out his words with heckles and horns.

But civility in Belfast City Hall has gradually risen along with Sinn Fein's growing strength in working-class Catholic neighborhoods. Sinn Fein today holds 14 posts, more than any other party.

The council, founded after Belfast's birth as an industrial city in the early 19th century, got its first Catholic mayor in 1997, with the election of Alban Maginness, representing the moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party. The SDLP's nine members also backed Maskey in Wednesday's vote.

Alderdice said Maskey should be supported because the IRA in the past year had unveiled two of its hidden arms dumps to disarmament officials -- a pivotal part of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord.

Alderdice said it also made little sense to block Sinn Fein from largely symbolic local positions, given that Sinn Fein already takes part in a much more powerful coalition government for the entire British territory.

Chief responsibilities for local councils across Northern Ireland include oversight of parks, garbage collection and graveyards