DUBLIN, Ireland — Sinn Fein leaders met the Northern Ireland police commander yesterday for the first time since the Irish Republican Army-linked party voted to back law and order in the British territory."We think this is a very important first step in a whole process of delivering a new relationship between our community and the police," Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said following his delegation's 90-minute meeting in Belfast with Chief Constable Hugh Orde, commander of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Adams has met Orde twice before, in November 2004 and December 2006, as he edged his long-militant party toward cooperation with British law and order. Yesterday's meeting was considered significant because it followed the overwhelming January 28 vote by Sinn Fein's grass-roots membership to abandon its decades-old refusal to co-operate with the predominantly Protestant police.

Adams said the meeting would be "one in the start of a process of engagements, so that we all get policing right."

Sinn Fein, the major Catholic-backed party in Northern Ireland, is hoping to increase its strength in a March 7 election for the Northern Ireland Assembly. Britain expects the assembly to elect a Catholic-Protestant administration the following week that would be led by Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists, who represent most of the province's British Protestant majority.

Orde, a former deputy commander of London's Metropolitan Police, did not comment after meeting Sinn Fein.

Britain appointed Orde as police commander in Northern Ireland in 2002 to oversee a mammoth overhaul of the heavily militarised Royal Ulster Constabulary. A 10-year reform programme begun in 2001 has seen the force renamed the Police Service, given new uniforms and badges, and pursue a policy of preferential recruitment of Catholics.

Protestants say they will not share power — the central goal of Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace accord of 1998 — unless Sinn Fein begins working with the police. Analysts say Sinn Fein's dramatic U-turn on policing should win the party extra votes versus their moderate Catholic rivals, the Social Democratic and Labour Party or SDLP.

But anti-Sinn Fein die-hards are running against Sinn Fein candidates in the most hard-line Catholic areas to protest what they say is a sellout of traditional IRA policies.

A leading IRA traditionalist from the United States, New York lawyer Martin Galvin, arrived yesterday in Belfast to campaign on behalf of two candidates who oppose Sinn Fein's recent compromises.

Galvin, who was ousted several years ago as director of Irish Northern Aid, the US fund-raising arm of the IRA, said Sinn Fein's decision to accept the police meant it was "enforcing British law and the British state."

"Having opposed for 30 years those who gave legitimacy to the British crown forces, they have now done exactly the opposite of what they said. They are doing exactly what they criticised the SDLP for," Galvin said.