Two Sides of a Troubled Belfast Street

As the Orange Order parades approached, Belfast's two warring tribes prepared for what is not only a national holiday but also an annual excuse -- as if any were needed -- for mindless bloodshed. In the Protestant working-class areas, houses and store fronts sported Union Jacks, freshly painted shields bearing the up raised Red Hand of Ulster and tacky portraits of "King Billy" of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. On DESMOND BALL, a lean, tough machinery repairman who seems older than his 22 years, lives at the Protestant edge of the "peace line." Ball and his wife Maureen, 20, moved into his three-story brick house at No.78 Percy Street after last summer's riots -- when it be came available rather suddenly. A gang of Protestant toughs had burst in and given the Catholic family that lived there half an hour to clear out.

From his stoop, Desmond Ball can look across the sand bags and rubble of no man's land to No. 1 12, the house of "his neighbor, Hugh Davey. Ball has never met Davey, a Catholic, and he probably never will. "We've no Catholic friends," he says. "Individually a Catholic can be all right, but as a group, they're dangerous. I'd never turn my back on a Catholic. If we wanted Catholic friends and the word got around the neighborhood, we'd get our windows broken in. People feel that strongly."

Prejudice? "My parents didn't bring me up to be biased or to hate," he protests, "and I wouldn't bring my son Darren up that way. He can pick his own friends. But my father wouldn't let me marry a Catholic, and I'd never let my son marry one."

The trouble, Ball says, started with "these civil rights demands" -- namely, one-man, one-vote in Ulster elections, more equitable allocation of housing and jobs, and disbanding of the predominantly Protestant auxiliary police force known as the B-Specials. Now, Ball insists, the Catholics are "hell-bent" on unification with the Irish Republic to the south, which is not only poorer than the North but also Catholic-dominated.

The longer one talks the clearer it becomes that Ulstermen are fighting one another not over the future or even the present but the past. Like many of his friends, Ball has the upraised red hand tattooed on a forearm and is fiercely proud of the sash of his Loyal Orange Order lodge. "It's handed down for generations," he says. "My father belonged, and he handed his sash down to my elder brother." Ball says he would not shrink from the showdown he fully expects -- even though "if I was to get shot and die tonight, Maureen would get only an Orange widow's benefit of about ten or 1 5 pounds."

Bull foresees the tribal hatred going on for years and finally climaxing in civil war. "The Irish army will come in and back up the Catholics; the British army will back us up. In 30 or 40 years, there'll be no Northern Ireland." Actually, though, "nobody's thinking of the future. There's no future to think of." The Catholics are stocking up on arms, he says, "and there's as much over here as there is over there." Ulstermen are dropping their vacation plans this year, Ball says, because "they're afraid they'll come back and find their houses burned or occupied. I wouldn't think of buying a toy for my baby next Christmas. We may not be here -- any of us." the other side of the tommie-patrolled "peace line," the city's Catholic minority disappeared behind closed doors and shutters. Last week TIME Correspondent Lansing Lamont toured both sides of the barbed wire to interview two men who stand on opposite sides of the sectarian barriers. Physically at least, they live no more than 150 yards apart. Spiritually, the distance that separates them seems incalculable.

EVEN more than Ball, Hugh Davey lives in the past --and even though he is 80, Davey has hardly been mellowed by experience. He is a retired pubkeeper who lives with two sisters, one 78 and the other 82, on his government and his old-age pension of $12 a week. Davey finds Belfast's current agony all too familiar. In 1920, shortly before partition and during the height of "The Troubles" that racked Ireland for several years, he and his sisters were run out of their house on Belfast's Crumlin Road by a Protestant mob. "If it hadn't been for the military then," he recalls, "they'd have burned our furniture on the street." When a new generation of beery young toughs swept down last summer, Davey was well prepared for their advance. Molotov cocktails and paving stones destroyed 14 Catholic-owned houses on Percy Street, but Davey's was saved by water from the buckets he kept filled and ready in each room. Says Davey: "For three hours it kept up, and we said more prayers in that time than we'd said in a lifetime. We didn't think we'd survive the morning."

Nowadays, Davey does not venture out of his house after 3 p.m. "If the troops were withdrawn,' he says, "we wouldn't be here one week. They'd come down here and firebomb us."

"They" and Davey go back a long way. "Even when I was seven," he recalls, "the Protestants used to put up orange arches over some of the streets. We used to walk through a small brook rather than under those arches." Nevertheless, Davey says he found them "rather nice people, though there was little contact."

Then why all the troubles? Despite "pious platitudes all the time from our leaders," he says, Belfast's Catholics still feel "like second-class citizens." "The ruling Protestants have always had the good jobs. We've always been hewers of wood and drawers of water. If I'd been a Protestant I'd probably have had a better job instead of pulling pints for 27 years."

Davey scoffs at the prevailing Protestant fears that hang over the country. Ireland under Dublin's rule? Davey would not mind a United Ireland "if living standards in the South were as good as they are in the North. But I'd be satisfied to live in Ulster, too." Could the Catholics really outbreed the Protestant majority? "We're still a 2-to-l minority," he says. "It's like Cassius Clay saying he's afraid of a 17-year-old boy who's never been in the ring before."

Davey concedes that "I haven't had a Protestant in my house since I came to live here in 1958." He probably never will, for he sees no end to the ancient antagonisms--at least not in his lifetime. "It's a tradition," the old pensioner muses. "No, I can't see any way out." Nor, just up the street, on the other side of no man's land, can young Desmond Ball.

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