"Decent Poor"

Falls Road where Belfast shipwrights and millworkers live is a grimy, normally noisy district. For more than a year now Falls Road has been uncomfortably quiet. One after another Belfast's shipyards and mills have been laying off more & more men, shutting down. Of Belfast's 425,000 souls, 100,000 are on the dole. Pale men in cloth caps lounge in doorways, waiting for the visits of relief workers.

Last week the lid blew off. Aroused, so the police said, by relief workers' complaints at their own meager salaries, a mob of 10,000 jobless poured out of the Falls Road district and marched on the city poorhouse in an effort to force the Ulster government to increase their dole. A gang of toughs discovered a Free State truck loaded with cases of Guinness's stout from Dublin. In no time the air was thick with stout bottles. Store windows were smashed, dairies and greengrocers looted, bonfires lighted. Hand to hand fighting broke out at several places.

The police were quick. Riot calls brought them from all six North Ireland counties as fast as careening trucks could skid over the roads. As in Dublin in 1916, the rioters started sniping from the rooftops. Belfast police wasted no time, replied with revolvers & rifles. In a few hours the Dublin comparison became even stronger. In from Holywood barracks came a battalion of the Royal Innis-killing Fusiliers with machine guns unlimbered. The King's Royal Rifles were ordered to Belfast as fast as possible. Martial law was not declared officially, but authorities clamped on an 8 p. m. curfew on the city, sent out patrols to break up unauthorized gatherings.

Into night court were hustled half a hundred rioters with torn clothes and bloody heads. One Frederick Bar was still truculent.

"I can't stay in jail tonight, your worship," he pleaded. "I can't stay in jail. Think of my public! I have to fight Jack Flynn for the Irish lightweight championship tonight."

In two days of rioting two people were killed, some 60 wounded. North Irish authorities including His Grace the Duke of Abercorn, Governor of Northern Ireland, and Sir Charles Wickham, Inspector General of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were bewildered by the violence of the outbreak, could not understand how normally law-abiding Ulstermen could be so aroused.

"This is no genuine working class movement," said Sir Charles. "They don't go around throwing stones at policemen. It is the Communists who have gone to work among them. . . . We know many of the tough customers and unfortunately they have got at the decent poor."

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