A young boy plays football in front of an IRA mural in the Ballymurphy estate in west Belfast on Thursday.

Meanwhile, in an IRA power base called Ardoyne, some Catholics feared the IRA pledge was a dangerous surrender that would encourage attacks from surrounding Protestant districts. Others predicted IRA members would defect to burgeoning dissident groups opposed to compromise.

Some analysts and politicians warned that the outlawed IRA -- which pointedly will not disband -- left wiggle room for its members to keep some weapons and control a criminal empire in a territory whose Roman Catholic and Protestant communities remain deeply divided.

The IRA has faced mounting international pressure to disarm and disband since December, when police blamed it for a world-record $50 million bank robbery. The following month IRA members knifed to death a Catholic civilian outside a Belfast bar, touching off an unprecedented campaign for justice by the victim's family.

In its statement, the IRA said it had "formally ordered an end to the armed campaign," a fundamental advance on its existing 1997 cease-fire, which had been open-ended. The statement was read aloud by IRA veteran Seanna Walsh in a DVD recording distributed to broadcasters.

The IRA said it instructed its members to "dump arms." It didn't specify how, or whether members would be allowed to retain any weapons, but said its representative would reopen talks immediately with John de Chastelain, a retired Canadian general who since 1997 has been trying to disarm the IRA and Northern Ireland's myriad other outlawed gangs.

From Dublin to Washington, leaders voiced hope that the IRA really is going out of business after killing 1,775 people and maiming thousands more in a dogged but doomed campaign.

In Washington, President Bush's envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss, welcomed the IRA statement as "very encouraging," but he cautioned: "We will soon see whether these words will be turned into deeds."

Former President Clinton, who became the first U.S. leader to intervene in Northern Ireland and spurred Britain to negotiate with Sinn Fein, said outside his suburban New York home that the IRA move was "potentially the biggest thing to happen in this peace process since the Good Friday agreement."

But analysts said the key line of the IRA text was simultaneously its most sweeping and its most broadly debatable.

(Source: CNN)