Pied Pipers of Peace

Betty Williams, 33, was driving home from her invalid mother's house in the Catholic Andersontown district of Belfast on the afternoon of Aug. 10 when she saw a car spin out of control, its IRA driver shot through the heart by a British soldier. The car slammed a pedestrian, Anne Maguire, and her three children against a school railing. Maguire, a mechanic's wife, was so seriously hurt that as she lay in an intensive-care ward at Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital last week, she still did not know that the three children--Joanne, 8, John, 3, and Andrew, 6 weeks --were dead. Nor did she know that their deaths had provoked Betty Williams into organizing the most impressive peace demonstrations that Northern Ireland has seen in seven years of fighting.

"When I saw on the television that the children were dead, I just couldn't take any more of it," recalls Williams, a housewife whose husband is a marine engineer now at sea off Canada. "I was sitting with my sister and a friend, all of us apathetic--like so many others --behind our Venetian blinds. I say, 'I'm going out, and I'm going to knock on people's doors in Andersontown to see how many people feel just as we do.' " The three set off with note pads into an area long known as an IRA stronghold, and within hours, they had hundreds of signatures on a peace petition. "I was like the Pied Piper," says Williams. "I ended up with a hundred women doing the same as me that night. Since then my life has gone topsy-turvy."

The following day Mairead Corrigan, a 32-year-old secretary and aunt of the three slain Maguire children, was looking out of her parents' front-porch window in Andersontown when she saw 200 protesting women march by. Corrigan joined Williams' ranks, and together they called for a women's peace rally the next Saturday at the spot where the children had been killed. Some 10,000 women, some wheeling prams, streamed into the rally from Protestant and Catholic districts long regarded as irreconcilably hostile. Another rally was called for the following Saturday, and this time the women arrived 20,000 strong, with makeshift banners bearing the names of their streets and demanding peace.

Last week, behind the drawn Venetian blinds of No. 20 Orchardville Gardens, Williams' home, the two women were planning a third rally that was to take them on Saturday into the heart of Belfast's most fervently Loyalist Protestant district, Shankill Road. "I went there last night to meet some of the Protestant women who have been organizing from their end," Corrigan told TIME last week. "Do you know, it was the first time I had been there in seven years."

Corrigan and Williams, who plan to take their campaign throughout Northern Ireland, have also received death threats and obscene letters branding them "touts" (informers). "We will not be deterred by the hysterics of the peace-at-any-price brigade," huffed one IRA officer. The Protestant Telegraph, the Rev. Ian Paisley's fanatically Loyalist newspaper, also denounced the women's peace movement as "spurious" and "priest-inspired." After a gang of youngsters tried to set fire to her house, Williams sent her two children into hiding with friends.

DEATH TO BETTY WILLIAMS reads the slogan scrawled on a roadway near her home. "I'm scared out of my wits," admits Williams, "but we will not be intimidated by these thugs any longer."

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