The sex scandal that has transfixed Northern Ireland in recent days has a cinematic echo: a 60-year-old Mrs. Robinson who was caught in an affair with a man who was 19 at the time, and is now at the center of a scandal that threatens to bring down the power-sharing government that has steered the province out of 30 years of sectarian bloodshed. This Mrs. Robinson, Iris, a stridently moralistic lawmaker, is the wife of the province's loyalist first minister, Peter Robinson, who is now struggling to keep his job. The revelations come when the mostly Protestant loyalists and mostly Catholic republicans are in increasingly bitter discussions about how to put in place the last and most difficult piece of the U.S.-brokered power-sharing agreement: the transfer of police and justice powers to the unity government. If Peter Robinson were forced from power, analysts say, there would be little chance of any new loyalist leader risking the wrath of his followers by moving ahead with the deal. Last week, an emotional Peter Robinson told reporters that he learned of his wife's infidelity only on the night last March when she tried to commit suicide over the affair. But the sympathy he earned turned to demands for his resignation when a BBC documentary on Thursday revealed that Iris Robinson had taken $80,000 in secret loans from property developers to finance the investment of her lover, Kirk McCambley, now 21, in a cafe near Belfast, the province's capital. Neither she nor her husband had reported the loans to the Belfast assembly or the British Parliament, where the Robinsons each hold dual seats. For now, Peter Robinson's survival as first minister depends on an investigation of the loan deal by an independent counsel, yet to be named, whose appointment Robinson promised on Friday night. He said he learned important details about the loan only from the BBC documentary, and added, 'I don't believe that I have done anything wrong.' Under the rules of the power-sharing agreement, if Robinson resigns over the scandal, his republican counterpart, Martin McGuinness, too, will be forced from office. In that climate, political experts in the province say, it might take months, or even years, to reconstruct a power-sharing government, leaving the British government once again to administer the province by decree. 