Northern Ireland: Deepening Bitterness

As a Good Humor truck jingled incongruously in the street outside, a leader of the Irish Republican Army hunched over a table in a small brick house in Belfast last week and described the battle plans of his illegal organization. "We're not strong enough for a victory like that of the Allies in Europe," he said quietly, "but we can make it so expensive that the British will have to cut their losses and run."

The following night, masked men burst into a Catholic home in Belfast's Ballymurphy area where two British troopers, on leave from Germany, sat watching television with relatives. The intruders opened fire, wounding the two Britons as well as a 17-year-old boy. Earlier that day, masked gunmen tried unsuccessfully to bomb the Belfast headquarters of the ruling Unionist Party.

Created Lull. Despite such hit-and-run attacks, Ulster's Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, whose seizure of some 300 suspected I.R.A. members and other activists two weeks ago had provoked four days of rioting, maintained that his action had checked the terrorism. The I.R.A., however, took full credit for the apparent pause. "There is a lull that we've created ourselves," said one I.R.A. member. "We have refused to be pushed into a corner where we have to fight on British terms."

The bitterness deepened when British troops killed two men, one of them a deaf mute: the army said he had been waving a pistol, while Catholic bystanders claimed he was unarmed. Ulster's Catholics were also angered because the internment without trial had not applied equally to extremists on the other side; none of the 232 still held were Protestant. Elaborate rumors of their mistreatment circulated through Northern Ireland's six counties, leading William Cardinal Conway, Catholic Primate of All Ireland, to charge that "there is prima-facie evidence that entirely innocent men are being subjected to humiliating and brutal treatment." This prompted the British Army to order an inquiry.

Maximum Damage. Moderate Catholic leaders had earlier proclaimed a campaign of civil disobedience, and throughout Ulster, Catholics began to withhold their payments of rent and property taxes. A one-day strike virtually shut down the business district of the predominantly Catholic city of Londonderry. When 1,300 British troops attempted to dismantle the recently rebuilt Derry barricades, which since 1969 have symbolized the Catholics' determination to defend themselves, residents responded with rioting and random rifle fire. Two moderate M.P.s, trying to restore order, were arrested for "failing to move on the command of a member of Her Majesty's forces." Next day, 30 leading Londonderry Catholics resigned from civic bodies in a total withdrawal of the city's Catholic community from public life.

The Irish Republic's Prime Minister John Lynch warned the British government that, unless it stopped trying to achieve a "military solution," he would back the passive-resistance policy of Northern Ireland's Catholics. Retorted British Prime Minister Edward Heath: "Your telegram is unjustified in its content, unacceptable in its attempt to interfere in the affairs of the United Kingdom," and calculated "to do the maximum damage to the cooperation between the communities in Northern Ireland."

Heath's icy reply to Jack Lynch hardly seemed designed to encourage the Dublin government to cut off the illegal supply of arms and men that seeps across the 200-mile border between south and north. But it may have served to strengthen Ulster's Prime Minister Faulkner, who has become increasingly vulnerable to the demands of his party's hardliners. As former Home Minister William Craig told TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast: "If Faulkner seems to make any more gestures of compromise, it'll bring the roof right down on top of him."

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