Northern Ireland: Violent Jubilee

DOHERTY, August 10, 1971, shot by British army. Edward, beloved husband of Marie, rest in peace. Mary, Queen of Ireland, pray for him.

AFTER four days and nights of guerrilla warfare, a ghostly stillness settled over Northern Ireland. But the rubble, the occasional curls of smoke and the death notices in the newspapers remained as hideous reminders of the worst outbreak of civil strife in the 50 years since the partition of Ireland. In its brief span, the fighting claimed the lives of 25 men and women, including three of the 12,500 British troops on duty in Northern Ireland. It sent at least 5,500 Catholics streaming over the southern border into the Irish Republic; it forced at least 1,500 Protestants to flee their homes; and it destroyed millions of dollars worth of property, including 500 homes and 50 factories and stores, in a region that was already one of Europe's most impoverished.

Yet the citizens of that embattled and bloody anachronism--known to its Protestant majority as Ulster and to its Catholic minority as "the Six Counties" --could thank their separate but equal gods that the toll had been no greater than it was.

Ulstermen could also be grateful that the peak of violence passed without an immediate widening of the conflict. The government had not declared a general curfew or a state of martial law; a widespread Protestant backlash against Catholic militancy had not appeared; and members of the illegal Irish Republican Army (the I.R.A.) had not resorted to mass terrorism. Nonetheless, the outburst marked a reversion to outright religious warfare. From Protestant and Catholic alike comes the warning in that pungent northern twang: "There's going to be a bloodbayeth, I'm afrayud."

Siege Mentality. To foreigners who have never known the Northern Irish or seen the drab, mean slums of their cities, it seems all but incomprehensible that a corner of Great Britain, that most gentle and civilized of lands, should be beset in this day and age by a holy war. Ulstermen themselves have often argued that the real issue is not religion but a complex combination of economics (an entrenched Protestant majority preserving its job preferences over a poorer Catholic minority) and political allegiance (to the British Crown or to a reunited Ireland). But as Irish Scholar Conor Cruise O'Brien, a leader of the Irish Labor Party, once observed, such arguments seem mostly designed to serve an Ulsterman's need for a particular image of himself and his nation. That image, "if not altogether respectable, is at least modern: 'We are not really living in the Middle Ages. So this is not a religious war; it is political. Twentieth century!' "

Basically, the tragedy of Northern Ireland is rooted in the 17th century and not the 20th. Protestant Orangemen still commemorate the victory of the Protestant William of Orange in 1690 in the Battle of the Boyne; in Londonderry the annual Apprentice Boys parade memorializes the young apprentices who closed the city gates against the forces of the Catholic King James II in 1688. Such celebrations are not merely reminders of a rich heritage; they are also reassertions of dominance over the Catholics of the north and of vigilance against the Catholics of the south. Both of Northern Ireland's tribes are beset by a siege mentality: Ulster's approximately 500,000 Catholics feel politically powerless at the hands of its 1,000,000 Protestants; the Protestants in turn feel threatened by the 2,700,000 Catholics of the Irish Republic to the south.

The present chapter of Ulster's troubled history stems from the rise of a predominantly Catholic civil rights movement in the late 1960s. Slowly, grudgingly, the province's perpetually Protestant and conservative Unionist Party government made concessions to the long-neglected Catholics. Property qualifications for local elections were scrapped; public housing, which had heavily favored Protestants, was removed from political control; a system of gerrymandering that had ensured Protestant rule over the heavily Catholic city of Londonderry was abolished. Most important, from the Catholic viewpoint, was that the Protestant police auxiliary (the notorious "B Specials") was disbanded; and the regular police force, also strongly Protestant, was stripped of its paramilitary duties.

Cold-Blooded Murder. The reforms came too slowly to satisfy the Catholics fully, and they enraged the Protestants. Riots flared in 1969, and the British army moved in to establish barbed-wire "peace lines."

While Ulster seethed, two governments fell in quick succession under persistent attack from such Protestant extremists as the Rev. Ian Paisley and former Home Minister William Craig. Brian Faulkner, Northern Ireland's third Premier in 23 months, took office last March in a period of rising unrest. As a gesture of conciliation, Faulkner advocated the establishment of three new parliamentary committees, two of which would be chaired by opposition members. But Protestant and Catholic alike were lukewarm to the plan. As friction increased early this summer, Catholic opposition leaders boycotted the Ulster Parliament and threatened to set up their own alternative assembly. Guerrilla incidents, meanwhile, were on the increase--caused in most cases by the militant "provisional" wing of the old I.R.A., which favors violent means to achieve union with the Irish Republic. One of the ugliest incidents was the coldblooded murder--still unsolved--of three young off-duty British soldiers, who were lured from a Belfast pub last March and shot on a lonely road.

Last week's violence was set off by a tragic accident and the harsh action of a weak government. When a small delivery truck backfired at a traffic light in Belfast, a nervous British sentry apparently mistook the sound for a sniper's shot and gunned down the driver, a Catholic father of six. Catholic passions quickly rose to the flash point, and Protestant right-wingers demanded that British troops "take the gloves off."

A few days earlier, already under pressure to smash the I.R.A., Faulkner had flown to London for a secret meeting with British Prime Minister Edward Heath. Faulkner and Heath agreed to invoke the special powers of preventive detention--i.e., imprisonment without trial--for suspected subversives. Heath attempted to divert suspicion of impending emergency action by going back to his yachting immediately. A few days later he led Britain to victory in the internationally contested Admiral's Cup races.

Psychopathic Revulsion. At dawn one morning last week, soldiers began hammering on doors in Belfast, Londonderry and half a dozen smaller towns in Ulster, rounding up some 300 suspected members of the I.R.A. "We are acting," said Faulkner, "not to suppress freedom but to allow the overwhelming mass of our people to enjoy freedom from fear of the gunman, of the nightly explosion, of kangaroo courts and all the apparatus of terrorism." Then in a mild concession to Catholic opinion, he slapped a six-month ban on all parades, including the potentially explosive Apprentice Boys of Derry march scheduled for last week.

Northern Ireland's Catholics were furious. "There is one issue on which virtually every Catholic, moderate and extremist, antipartition and pro-partition, is united," said a Catholic lawyer in Belfast, "and that is an almost psychopathic revulsion toward internment." In its roundup, however, the army failed to snare many key activists. Some arrests were based on ten-year-old dossiers. Besides, as one I.R.A. leader told TIME Correspondents Curtis Prendergast and John Shaw, many men went into hiding or crossed into the Irish Republic after learning that jail cells in Belfast were being cleared to make room for detainees.

Bonfire Barricades. In no time savage fighting broke out in the cities, particularly in Belfast's Catholic ghettos of Ardoyne, Falls Road and Ballymurphy. Bonfire barricades blazed throughout West Belfast, and petrol bombs arched in the night sky like Roman candles.

Perhaps the most tragic symbol of the violence was a huge fire in Belfast's Farringdon Gardens, a "mixed" area where Protestants had lived peacefully beside Catholics for a generation. As fears rose, extremists set some 200 houses ablaze: many were Protestants destroying their own homes before fleeing to safer districts. "We're getting out," said one, "but no Catholic will get these houses." A Catholic resident lamented, "In winter we used to shovel snow off each other's paths; now everybody is cutting each other's throat."

Inevitably, a shower of bullets fell on the innocent. A parish priest was killed in a crossfire just after he administered the last rites to a man he thought was dying; the man survived to tell the story. On a Belfast street a young man, one of 13 children of an unemployed laborer, wept uncontrollably as he told his sister: "They say Dad's dead; they say he's in the morgue."

The fighting covered a wider section of Belfast than ever before. But still, much of Ulster's middle class remained physically untouched by the turmoil. Odd patches of tranquillity survived in the very midst of danger. As he dodged stones and petrol bombs, Correspondent Shaw looked inside a window to see three middle-aged women placidly watching a television documentary about East Africa.

In Londonderry, as Protestants were hanging out their anniversary Union Jacks and repainting their murals of "King Billy" (William of Orange), 400 Catholic women and girls marched up from the raw new apartments of the Bogside to the ancient city walls. They chanted, "Oh we hate the British soldiers, yes we do, yes we do," lifting the hats of British sentries as they marched past. The demonstration was organized by Bernadette Devlin, who as a representative from Mid-Ulster is the youngest Member of Parliament at Westminster. Bernadette, 23, was too pregnant (by a man she has refused to name) to march, so she rode in a loudspeaker car. Her political stock has clearly been lifted by the crisis and by her return to the barricades. As one priest joked, "If she were the hoor of Babylon, we'd elect her now."

Tantamount to Heresy. By the time a chill rain ended the fighting on the fourth day, I.R.A. leaders were claiming that their cause had been strengthened. Their strategy is to force Faulkner into a spiral of violence leading to suspension of the Ulster government and a return to direct rule by London for the first time in 50 years; finally, they hope, it would lead to a political settlement between London and Dublin.

In Dublin, the Irish Republic's Prime Minister John Lynch condemned the Ulster government for resorting to internment, even though he had threatened to invoke it himself last year against Eire's own I.R.A. activists. He also sent his External Affairs Minister, Dr. Patrick Hillery, to London to seek joint talks with London and Ulster over the crisis. Ulster's Protestant politicians angrily shouted "interference!" To them the idea of a discussion with Dublin is tantamount to heresy.

Even so, many politicians in London were beginning to face the fact that a new solution must be found for Northern Ireland. British Labor Party leaders are leaning toward some sort of Ulster-Eire relationship, perhaps an all-Ireland Council as proposed by former Home

Minister James Callaghan. Labor's former Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart went so far as to say that "there can be no solution of this problem except in the context of a united Ireland." The Conservative government, however, is in no mood to tinker with the existing setup. Ulster's Unionists, after all, have provided the Tories with at least nine or ten seats in the British Parliament (out of twelve for Northern Ireland) ever since 1921, and the Tories do not want to antagonize them.

Shaky Survival. For the time being, Ulster's crisis has passed. As Correspondent Prendergast notes: "In Ulster crises come like spasms, and they always subside. Newly burned-out cars rust away beside the hulks of old ones; in a few weeks it is hard to tell whether a particular building was wrecked in this year's troubles or last year's. Shoppers hardly glance at the signs, BOMB DAMAGE SALE-- BIG REDUCTIONS."

But each inning of violence seems worse than the one before, and another eruption would only strengthen the hand of the Protestant hard-liners like Paisley and Craig, who would be tempted to deal with the Catholics as Oliver Cromwell did. Since those with sufficient influence to succeed him are too far to the right to be acceptable to London or to the Catholics, Faulkner would be Ulster's last Prime Minister--and his successor would be a British proconsul appointed by London and backed by the British army.

Perhaps the most discouraging feature of Ulster's bloody week was the fact that the militants on both sides, who hold the whip hand, were growing in strength while moderates stood helplessly by. As Ivan Cooper, the only Protestant M.P. among the Ulster Parliament's Catholic opposition, says: "In this country, moderate is spelled coward. We have too much religion and not enough Christianity." Ulster's problem is also that it has all too many extremists, sometimes spelled bigots.

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