Hard-liners at opposing extremes of Northern Irish politics surged ahead of moderates Thursday in the election for a new legislature, undermining hopes of reviving a Catholic-Protestant government in this British territory.

Partial returns from Wednesday's vote showed strong gains for both Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, the party linked to Irish Republican Army  a near-impossible combination for reviving power-sharing.

Paisley, the Protestant firebrand who has spent four decades opposing compromise with Catholics, grabbed a reporter's lapel Thursday to emphasize the point.

"Are you hearing me clearly? I'll not negotiate with IRA murderers and bombers. Never. And any member of my party who does will no longer be in my party," the 77-year-old preacher said.

Most seats in the 108-seat legislature — originally elected in June 1998 to promote cooperation between the province's British Protestants and Irish Catholics — remained unfilled as darkness fell. An unusually low turnout below 60 percent suggested many voters had despaired of any progress.

Paisley's Democratic Unionists were in first place Thursday night with 20 lawmakers elected. David Trimble's Ulster Unionists — the traditional No. 1 Protestant-backed party that has been badly divided by his pragmatic leadership — trailed with 12.

Analysts predicted, however, that the two Protestant parties would end up extremely close to each other when final results come in Friday.

Whoever prevails on the Protestant side will have to deal with the reality of a much-strengthened Sinn Fein on the Catholic side of the house.

Sinn Fein had already won 13 seats Thursday night, while its longtime moderate rival, the Social Democratic and Labor Party, had only three declared winners, among them the party's leader, Mark Durkan.

One of the moderate Catholic's likely losers, John Fee, said Catholic voters had elected "street fighters instead of diplomats and peacemakers."

Crucially, forming a new power-sharing administration would require majority support from both the Catholic and Protestant blocs of the legislature.

Sinn Fein's emergence as the strongest Catholic party will make it even tougher to marshall Protestant support, because under current power-sharing rules, Sinn Fein will be entitled to the administration's No. 2 post and three other Cabinet posts. In the last coalition, to the fury of many Protestants, Sinn Fein held just two posts.

Full results were not expected until Friday night because of a complex system that allowed voters to rank candidates in order of preference — "1," "2," "3" and so on. This system means ballots are recounted more than a dozen times as votes are transferred from elected or eliminated politicians to candidates still in the running for a seat.

The Democratic Unionists won 25.7 per cent of No. 1 votes. Sinn Fein came second with 23.5 per cent — historic highs for both parties.

The Ulster Unionists had 22.7 per cent, while the Social Democratic and Labor Party had 17 per cent — a major drop-off from 1998, when the SDLP won the most votes.

Trimble and the former SDLP leader, John Hume, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 as a tribute to the Good Friday agreement. The two parties led the first administration formed under that pact but have seen their support fade.

The crisis-prone coalition — which included two Democratic Unionists who refused to attend Cabinet meetings — collapsed in October 2002 over an IRA intelligence-gathering scandal inside the government.

In 1998 the Ulster Unionists won 28 seats, the Social Democratic and Labor Party 24, the Democratic Unionists 20 and Sinn Fein 18.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, appearing on television alongside SDLP election director Brid Rodgers, poked fun at her claim that many of the SDLP's traditional supporters hadn't bothered to vote this time.

"The SDLP vote did come out. The problem is, a sizable section of it voted for us," said Adams, who topped the vote in his Catholic west Belfast power base.

Political scientist Paul Arthur said the early returns indicated that the Ulster Unionists might stay one or two seats ahead of the Democratic Unionists, while Sinn Fein would win around 25 and the SDLP less than 20.

That would leave Trimble with too little support to take his party back into an administration with a strengthened Sinn Fein, Arthur noted. Two of Trimble's harshest critics inside the party, Jeffrey Donaldson and David Burnside, emerged Thursday among the top Ulster Unionist vote-winners.

"Trimble's still going to have big difficulties. The people doing really well are the people who have opposed his leadership down the line," Arthur said.

Britain resumed direct control of Northern Ireland in October 2002 after police accused Sinn Fein's top Assembly aide of gathering intelligence on potential IRA targets.

The Assembly is unlikely to convene before Christmas, largely because its first key task would be to vote to elect the senior Catholic and Protestant administration figures. Failure to elect politicians to the top two posts within six weeks would trigger the Assembly's renewed dissolution and a new election.

Trimble has insisted he won't seek to revive power-sharing until the IRA formally renounces violence and promises to disarm fully.

The IRA has been sticking to a 1997 cease-fire and has handed over three caches of weapons to disarmament officials, most recently last month, as part of a failed initiative to restore Ulster Unionist confidence in Sinn Fein.

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