A Fateful Second Front

ON both sides of the Irish border last week, a new dimension was added to the violence. In Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army's militant "Provisional" wing brought out ominous new weaponry--Soviet-model rocket launchers--to fire at British military targets. In the Irish Republic to the south, the terror that the North has known for three years suddenly made its appearance. Car bombs went off outside a labor union hall and a Dublin department store, and a parcel bomb exploded in a late-night cinema. Two were killed, and over 140 injured.

The Dublin bombings, although immediately denied by the I.R.A., dramatically affected the mood in the South, where the Fianna Fail government of Prime Minister Jack Lynch had been battling to push harsh new anti-I.R.A. legislation through the Dail (Parliament). "They have turned their guns on the security forces of this state," declared Lynch. "Will they next turn their rockets on targets in this country?"

Casting aside old rules of evidence, the legislation proposed that a police superintendent need only state that he "believed" an accused person to be an I.R.A. member. This statement alone could constitute grounds leading to imprisonment of up to five years. The Dail's gates were defended against hostile demonstrators by some 2,000 police and troops in riot formation as debate got under way. Inside Parliament, Lynch threatened to go to the country on a law-and-order ticket if the legislation should be defeated. But when news of Dublin's bombings struck, the parliamentary opposition crumbled quickly, averting a crisis. Of two opposition parties, labor voted against Lynch's bill but Fine Gael decided to abstain and the government won easily, 70-23 on the toughest measures taken so far in the republic to put down the I.R.A.

Lynch's tough new policy marked the opening of a second front against the I.R.A. Provisionals in their previous sanctuary in the South, and the I.R.A. fought back with bullets as well as bombs. An eight-man squad of Provisional gunmen boldly attempted to rescue their organization's chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain, who had been arrested the week before, convicted as a member of an illegal organization and sentenced to six months in prison (TIME, Dec. 4). MacStiofain promptly went on a hunger and thirst strike to protest his imprisonment, and was taken to Dublin's rambling old Mater Hospital for treatment.

Clumsy Rescue. Slipping through the security net disguised as priests and hospital orderlies, the gunmen grabbed a nun and, using her as a shield, advanced down the hallway toward MacStiofain's room. There, as two of the gunmen dropped to their knees and threatened to kill the hospital attendants present, detectives closed in shooting. In the pandemonium, two I.R.A. men were wounded and four others were caught later, but the clumsy rescue attempt had been too close for comfort. The following day, MacStiofain was bundled off by helicopter to the Curragh, the Irish army's main barracks 30 miles outside Dublin.

By that time MacStiofain, in the tenth day of his strike, was described by his wife Mary as a "dying man." MacStiofain, boasted Provisional leaders, would become a martyr, like Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, who was arrested at an I.R.A. meeting in 1920 and died in a British prison in the 74th day of a hunger strike. In MacStiofain's place, they predicted, "a hundred other MacStiofains" would rise.

Then came the deflating anticlimax. As he prepared to receive Communion from a priest, MacStiofain broke his thirst strike. The Rev. Sean McManus, an old friend who had flown in from Baltimore after MacStiofain was arrested, said he found the I.R.A. leader "shaking, on the point of death" from a heart seizure and crying deliriously, "I love Ireland, I belong to Ireland, God give us freedom!" McManus pleaded with MacStiofain to relent. "If you die tonight," said the priest, "I am convinced there will be serious trouble in the South of Ireland." A moment later, MacStiofain took a sip of water, then a Communion wafer and finally a cup of hot, sugared tea. If that was a victory for common sense, it was at least a temporary psychological defeat for the I.R.A.

In the North, the I.R.A. bravado took on a more fatal form, to others. At the sleepy border village of Belleek, a rocket hurtled through a thick steel-encased window of the local police station, killing a 55-year-old police constable, the father of six children. Across Ulster, 17 similar rockets were fired, though they caused no more fatalities. The weapons were identified as RPG-7 rocket launchers, a more sophisticated and modern version of the World War II bazooka; they are commonly manufactured in Communist countries and used by many Russian allies.

The Provisionals were plainly trying to win back by force a place at the conference table that they have been denied since last summer's fragile truce broke down and they resumed bombing. Last week British Prime Minister Edward Heath revealed in Parliament that I.R.A. truce feelers had recently been made again through intermediaries, but the Provisionals' conditions for political talks are unacceptable to the British: a declaration of British intent to quit Northern Ireland, withdrawal of troops to their barracks, and a general amnesty. The British government is no longer interested, and not only out of fear of infuriating the Protestants. The Northern Ireland army command claims that more than 182 I.R.A. officers and men have been arrested since July, a total that could only rise with the prospect ahead of more arrests in the South.

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