A news conference accompanying the release of the plan in Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital, became the stage for an eruption of the anger and grief still burning among those who lost relatives in the sectarian violence. The struggle cast Protestant paramilitaries loyal to Britain against armed groups with roots in the Roman Catholic minority, including the Irish Republican Army, that campaigned for a united Ireland.

As the authors of the plan prepared to speak at a crowded Belfast hotel, Protestant hard-liners jumped up to shout insults and trade recriminations with others in the audience with links to the I.R.A. Those involved in the protests included men and women who lost relatives in the violence, or were wounded in the I.R.A. attacks that accounted for more than 60 percent of the deaths in the strife.

“My brother was an innocent man defending this whole community,” said Hazlett Lynch, whose brother, a police officer, was killed in a 1977 I.R.A. ambush, according to a report by Britain’s Press Association. “When I.R.A. men died while launching cowardly attacks on this community, they actually received justice. The families of those murderers should not be consoled with a single penny today.”

At one point, the gathering threatened to descend into violence amid the welter of jabbing fingers and virulent insults. One of those singled out in the tirades was Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the I.R.A. One protester shouted, “This is the man who was in charge of the I.R.A. on Bloody Friday,” the name given to a series of I.R.A. bombings on July 21, 1972, that killed nine people, including two British soldiers, and injured 130 civilians.

Others defended Mr. Adams, who was a central figure in the negotiations that brought most of the violence to an end with a power-sharing agreement that emerged from the 1998 Good Friday agreement. “You should be arrested,” one of Mr. Adams’s supporters shouted back amid the din. “Leave him alone. Why don’t you get out?”

The outbursts appeared to shock the two authors of the reconciliation plan, the former Anglican archbishop of Northern Ireland, Robin Eames, and Denis Bradley, a former Catholic priest and journalist who is vice chairman of Northern Ireland’s police board. At one point, the Very Rev. Eames appeared to offer a qualified apology. “Maybe this gesture, for those outside our group, is too sudden,” he said.

Appointed by the British government to head a panel called the Consultative Group on the Past, the two men spent 18 months preparing their 190-page report on steps to help Northern Ireland move toward a lasting peace. The report contained more than 30 proposals, including the establishment of a body to be known as the Legacy Commission, similar in some ways to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation panel after the collapse of apartheid, which would seek to bind the wounds of the past by investigating unresolved killings.

The new commission would take over existing efforts to investigate the hundreds of ambushes, assassinations and bombings whose perpetrators were never caught, encouraging I.R.A. militants and Protestant paramilitaries to come clean about their pasts. It would also look into some of the killings by the British Army and the province’s Protestant-dominated police force, and encourage meetings behind closed doors at which perpetrators and victims could seek reconciliation.

By far the most controversial of their proposals was the recommendation for what they called “recognition payments” to the families of all of those killed in the years of violence, even perpetrators of the violence.

Even before the report’s release, the proposal was bitterly denounced by spokesmen for the main Protestant groups, including Peter Robinson, who serves as Northern Ireland’s first minister under the power-sharing arrangement. Mr. Robinson said the Democratic Unionist Party he leads has “consistently opposed any equation between the perpetrator of the crimes during the Troubles and the innocent victim.”

“Terrorists died carrying out their evil and wicked deeds while innocent men, women and children were wiped out by merciless gangsters,” he said, but suggested that the recommendations needed further study.

Martin McGuinness, a former I.R.A. paramilitary leader who serves as deputy first minister in the Belfast government, called for careful reflection by all those involved. “I think that obviously dealing with the past is something which is of tremendous importance and significance for all,” he said, “but I think that once the report is published for all to see, it should be studied and I think we can make more definitive comments after that.”

The idea of payments to the families of those who died while carrying out attacks led to bitter outbursts in the British House of Commons during the prime minister’s weekly question time. Nigel Dodds, who represents the party led by Mr. Robinson, asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown to “acknowledge the deep hurt and offense that has been caused by the obnoxious proposal,” which he said “effectively does away with the distinction between murderers and those who they went out to murder and kill.”