The Murder of Santa Claus

With a touch of gallows humor the bluff but shaken citizens of beleaguered Belfast have taken to asking: "How many bombing days until Christmas?" In a heightened campaign of terror, the outlawed Irish Republican Army is apparently trying to bring the center of the city to a shuttered standstill by Christmas. Last week brought twelve major explosions and 27 deaths, the highest toll ever in Northern Ireland's troubled history. In addition, I.R.A. gunmen murdered three members of the Ulster Defense Regiment, a local militia with 6,000 members, most of them Protestants. One of the victims, however, was a Catholic gunned down in his own parlor as his five children looked on.

Fifteen persons, the largest number to die in a single incident, were killed when a large bomb, containing perhaps as much as 100 Ibs of gelignite, pulverized McGurk's Pub. a cheery, shabby Catholic bar located on the edge of downtown Belfast. As a British major helped direct the rescue operation, a sniper mortally wounded him with a bullet in the head.

The British army speculated that an I.R.A. terrorist used McGurk's for a rendezvous, and the bomb that he was carrying went off by accident. But the I.R.A. blamed the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Protestant equivalent of the I.R.A., for the blast, which killed three women and two children.

Gift Dynamite. The day after McGurk's was demolished, a six-story carpet and linoleum factory in East Belfast went up in flames. The fire, started by bombs set by two armed raiders, caused $2.5 million in damage and cost 600 people their jobs.

The next day, an explosion ripped a festively lit shopping arcade in Belfast, and flying glass wounded 21 people. At week's end, a bomb blew up in a crowded furniture store on Belfast's Protestant Shankill Road, killing four people. Bombs also went off in three other stores and offices, bringing to more than 1,000 the total number of explosions set in Ulster this year, most of them since the British began interning suspected I.R.A. terrorists without trial last August.

Though the British army has increased its patrols in midtown Belfast, shoppers laden with packages pose a serious problem: the holiday wrapping paper could hide gelignite. Merchants have boarded up store windows but keep their shops open, hoping that some buyers will continue to venture into the city's center.

The number is dwindling.

"Regardless of the cost to ourselves and regardless of the cost to anyone else, we will keep this campaign going," said Sean MacStiofain, chief of staff of the Provisional wing of the I.R.A.

But in one sense the campaign was plainly becoming counterproductive. The horror of Christmastime violence has produced a wave of revulsion in Britain as well as Ulster. But the violence also made many in Northern Ireland question their government's claim that the gunmen are being beaten. Claimed MacStiofain, "We are stronger than we have been for many months."

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