Chance for Compromise

"The only thing they haven't done yet is eat the dead." So said a Belfast policeman last week, shortly before Ulstermen went to the polls in Northern Ireland to choose members of a provincial Assembly for the first time in four years. The voters were vividly reminded that sectarian enmity forces them to live in an armed camp. In expectation of an outbreak of terrorism, all leaves for policemen were canceled.

The 16,000-strong British army garrison was on full alert. Manning extra patrols and road checks, the soldiers frisked voters as they entered a polling place.

As results of the complicated proportional voting trickled in, it became apparent at week's end that ex-Prime Minister Brian Faulkner's Unionist Party had won about one-third of the 78 seats in the new Assembly. The Loyalists, composed of Protestant hardliners, and the Catholic Social, Democratic and Labor Party (S.D.L.P.) formed the second largest blocs, while the nonsectarian Alliance Party finished a distant and disappointing fourth.

Glimmer of Hope. The scarcely unexpected results promise no quick or easy end to Ulster's agony. But the relatively large turnout of voters provides a glimmer of hope for Ulster moderates who want to give the British government plan of having both Catholics and Protestants share provincial political power a chance to work. By and large, the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army failed in its efforts to get voters to "Spoil Your Vote and Smash the System," as one of the Proves' newspaper ads had it.

The Loyalists--led by the Rev. Ian Paisley and former Home Affairs Minister William Craig--refuse to share any significant political power with Northern Ireland's 500,000 Catholics, who make up one-third of the population. Brian Faulkner, on the other hand, has pledged that his Unionists would be willing to work with some Catholics. A coalition of his party with the S.D.L.P. and the Alliance would have strength enough to control the committees that will rule on many day-today matters for the province.

Most disturbing was the violence that scarred the three-week election campaign. Nearly 90 bombs were detonated and 23 persons killed, bringing the death toll in Ulster during the past four years to 839. Two days before the election, Patrick Wilson, a leading Catholic politician and a chief aide to S.D.L.P. Leader Gerry Fitt, was hacked to death by an apparently new Protestant terrorist group called the Ulster Freedom Fighters. Wilson's murder suggested that members of the new Assembly would have a difficult time ahead of them in governing the still troubled province.

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