AMONG Northern Ireland's many impenetrable contradictions, none is more stark than the paradox of Gerry Adams as conciliator and Ian Paisley, man of God, only at ease with himself when gunmen pursue their deadly business. The prospect of peace has often wrong-footed those for whom extremism, the bully's push, seems the sole credential for power. But what we're witnessing now is the humiliating roar of amputation without anaesthetic as Paisley's old guard DUP finds itself unable to stand in the changed order.

It's a process all the more painful for the sufferers because it is self-inflicted. Even so, it serves a useful purpose, illustrating just how courageous David Trimble's own conversion has been. In a matter of weeks he has transformed himself from small-time provincial to statesmanlike leader. And while no-one minimises the problems ahead, Trimble has stamped his imprimatur on the UUP, thus freeing it to work at last to a

positive agenda.

But on all sides the dogs of war still circle those who advocate new politics. When the violence erupted almost 30 years ago some now supporting the

32-County Sovereignty Committee, the breakaway Republican group, weren't even born. Now, with the makings of a lasting settlement more credible than any of those terrible decades ever allowed, the renegades choose to fight not only the British but the compatriots they suddenly call traitors, the IRA and Sinn Fein. There is a classical sym-metry to the schism: splinter movements, sworn to continue ''the offen- sive'', are the psychotic offspring of terrorism, and ruefully the masters who reared them come to know they have tutored them too well. Yet when Adams and Trimble can contemplate escaping that maiming timewarp to sit at the same Assembly table, why should anyone view the May 22 referendum with such vehement contempt?

For certain Republicans, the Irish race memory, that emotional swampland of suffering, bitterness, and myth, long ago turned dying for The Cause into an appalling reflex. At one level the sister of the dead hunger striker, Bobby Sands, pledges herself to fight until Ireland is one. At another, children in certain parts of Belfast, Derry, Crossmaglen, and Portadown run towards the sound of gunfire as if, because of its familiarity, it carries no danger at all. But even after all these years the images which haunt us most are still the ones of mourners at the gravesides of slaughtered innocents, the ashen faces and sodden eyes of bewildered relatives as they clutch on to their remaining families and walk behind the coffins. An overwhelming yes from both communities on May 22 won't mean that peace is on the doorstep, but the difference from what's gone before is that peace, not hatred, is now

the goal.

for those bereaved, however, the weight of loss has been intensified by that Good Friday accord, the dreadful waste of all the dying and wounding even more horribly apparent. Of course, it must seem to some that violence is being rewarded, but decent folk know there is no future behind the barricades. For Bernadette Sands, however, her brother was a martyr, as indeed he was for Adams and Martin McGuinness. But she believes those two men have now betrayed him, so in her eyes the peace agreement is already one more score to be settled. Yet remembering the futility of Northern Ireland's time in hell is actually the only way both communities can honestly honour their dead, and Adams has understood this unspoken truth for years.

In 1994 he told the Falls Road that any ceasefire meant the IRA was actually telling the people to ''go out and win the peace'', an acknowledgement that the burgeoning grassroots com-munity action programmes were now

providing a forceful alternative to mainstream politics for both communities. Among the working-class Loyalists there was David Ervine's PUP and Gary McMichael's UDP which represented men who had left behind the brimstone of active terrorism and imprisonment

to seek stability by democratic means. Ervine's commitment during the talks process to ''overcoming the politics of victory and defeat'' expressed a vision almost unknown in Loyalism, and demonstrated how ruinously so many self-serving politicians had represented their constituencies.

Aberrant punishment squads still carried clout but, equipped with training from government courses in subjects like social welfare law, other ''subversives'' from each side now prided themselves in making the State work more efficiently for the most deprived in their communities. As a result, the quality, vitality, solid pragmatism, and success rate of community action in Northern Ireland is the most heartening life-line to have emerged from the mess. And it is out of this background that the valiant Women's Coalition became the province's newest and tiniest party. Yet size being everything in Ulster, there will be no provision for it at the Assembly table, and that is one of the smaller, but still significant, tragedies of Northern Ireland. At the talks, its contribution was often crucial because the Women's Coalition was the only genuinely inclusive party present, but 30 years ago the world

stopped on many counts for the Six Counties. The gains women made on male establishments elsewhere are missing there; Northern Ireland doesn't have a single woman MP or one woman member of the European Parliament. Indeed, those two words, The Troubles, have kept many unpalatable facts at bay, and sexual discrimination

is among them.