IRA Says It Will Abandon Violence

But local rule has been suspended for nearly three years, after allegations that the IRA was continuing such criminal activities as gunrunning and spying on its political rivals.

With support from the United States, the British and Irish governments have been seeking ways to get the two communities cooperating again and restore joint government. Protestant complaints that the IRA refused to give up its weapons emerged as a key point blocking agreement.

The republican movement -- so-called because it seeks to unite Northern Ireland with the overwhelmingly Catholic republic to the south -- suffered two recent setbacks that helped drive its leaders back to the negotiating table.

The first came when investigators publicly accused the IRA of the robbery of $50 million from a Belfast bank in December, an operation that damaged the organization's credibility and legitimacy in London, Dublin and Washington. Then in late January, IRA members allegedly killed a Catholic man in a brawl at a Belfast pub and tried to cover up the deed, an action that harmed its standing among hard-core supporters in blue-collar Catholic neighborhoods.

But beyond those problems, analysts say the IRA and the republican movement's leaders -- Adams and his deputy, Martin McGuinness -- became aware that in the world after Sept. 11, 2001, they could no longer sustain a paramilitary movement whose bombings and assassinations had terrorized civilians as well as soldiers.

Thursday's statement, read on a video by Seanna Walsh, a veteran IRA fighter and former prisoner, pointedly praised "the sacrifices of our patriot dead." It added, "We reiterate our view that the armed struggle was entirely legitimate."

The younger Paisley focused on this claim in his remarks. "This statement says absolutely nothing about the IRA disbanding," he said. "It justifies and legitimizes IRA atrocity after IRA atrocity. Atrocities, I may say, that are as bad as and in many instances worse than London suffered this July," he added, referring to the July 7 suicide bomb attacks that killed at least 56 people, including the four presumed bombers.

Residents in some of the working-class urban areas where the IRA has long ruled expressed fear that the organization's disarmament would leave them vulnerable to Protestant gangs. But relatives of some of the IRA's victims said the organization needed to loosen its grip on these neighborhoods and allow the province's revamped and reformed police force to take over.

If the IRA does not live up to its promise, warned Catherine McCartney, a sister of the man who was stabbed to death in Belfast in January, "then the next time someone is murdered in the same circumstances as our brother Robert, you will see the same thing happening with witnesses being intimidated and people not being brought to account."

Alan McBride, whose wife, Sharon, was among nine people killed by the IRA in a bombing of the Protestant Shankhill Road area in 1993, said the statement's claim that the conflict had been legitimate "was obviously put there to appease their hard-liners."

"As someone who was directly impacted by IRA violence, I don't understand and will never understand how you could legitimize the killing of innocent people," he added in an interview.

British officials released Sean Kelly, one of the men convicted of the bombing, from prison this week -- a move that deeply angered unionists even though it helped open the way for the declaration.

Political scientist Richard English, author of a recent history of the IRA, said that from the movement's viewpoint the statement was deeply significant. "This is an organization that defines itself by the need for violence as the way forward in politics," he said. "When it says it no longer requires violence, that's a huge change."

Still, he added, unionists were unlikely to be impressed because they had been disappointed by the organization's perceived failure to abide by previous commitments. "Unionists have just lost all sense of trust in what the IRA say, and they are probably going to want to have an awful lot of proof of action before they'll trust it," he said.

Special correspondent Mary Fitzgerald in Belfast contributed to this report.