Ten Years Later: Coping and Hoping

There is less violence, more repugnance against terrorism, but no real solution--yet

Honorable members dived for cover under their antique, leather-padded benches last week as demonstrators protesting Britain's military presence in Northern Ireland hurled something worse than slogans at the august mother of parliaments. Despite strict security, a man and a woman had managed to smuggle a truly noxious bundle of objections into the visitors' gallery at Westminster: packages of horse manure. After bombarding the M.P.s with the missiles, the coprophilic dissidents--one of whom was Yana Mintoff, 26, daughter of the Prime Minister of Malta--were dragged off by police.

The extraordinary invasion signified the onset of Ulster's "marching season," when the war-weary province's Catholics and Protestants celebrate--separately and often violently--past sectarian milestones. This week Protestants will don their orange sashes to parade through Belfast in honor of William of Orange's victory over England's last Catholic monarch, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Four weeks later, their opponents will parade in doleful memory of "Internment Day," the anniversary of a 1971 British military roundup where hundreds of Catholics were jailed without trials.

Ten sad years have passed since a peaceful civil rights movement blossomed among the Catholic minority, unexpectedly catalyzing violence and hatred in Northern Ireland. To date, the war between Ulster's Catholics and the Protestant majority--with British army regulars caught between--has left 1,837 dead, thousands disabled, and an uncountable number seared with fury against their neighbors. (Among the most recent fatalities: two Ulster constables, a reserve member of that force, and a young Belfast Catholic.) TIME London Bureau Chief Bonnie Angelo reports on Ulster today, and how its people have learned to cope with terror, and even to hope that it may some day end:

At the gate to the Protestant cemetery on Catholic Falls Road in Belfast, Canon Padraig Murphy, a towering Roman Catholic priest, and the Rev. Terence Rodgers, Rector of the Protestant Church of Ireland, greet families who have come to visit their dead. It is "Friendship Sunday"--one of four during the year when Protestants can be guaranteed safe conduct into this Catholic stronghold. The two men find discernible improvement in attitudes in Belfast, while reluctantly acknowledging that a new outbreak of violence has left nine dead in the preceding ten days. "A lot of it isn't political any more," observed Rodgers. "It is sheer gangsterism." Murphy concurs: "It only takes a few thugs to hold the whole community at ransom."

The two clergymen are fearful that Belfast is being unfairly portrayed around the world. But a first impression of the city is upsetting. Streetside windows are bricked against bombs. Barricades seal off free movement: the downtown shopping area is accessible only at stringently guarded checkpoints. British soldiers patrol the streets, 13,800 of them for six counties with 1.5 million people. And there is the fence, a political statement of corrugated metal that jaggedly separates Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods.

In rural south Armagh, a border county known as a stronghold of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army (Provos), Eugene Reavey, a Catholic, declares: "The deaths mean no more than highway statistics. If it doesn't touch you, you don't notice." Three of the dead were his brothers. Two were gunned down as they watched television in the family cottage. A third lived long enough to relate the fact that the killers were in British army uniforms. No one knows for certain, however, what Protestant faction (some Ulstermen are volunteer British army members) was behind the atrocity.

Reavey lives with fear. His wife Roisin talks of leaving the country when their three young children reach their teen years. Reavey, a prosperous builder and poultry consultant, looks at his six-month-old son gurgling happily, and reluctantly agrees. "The young fellow, I worry about him."

Leaving the country is not really an option for the average family. Money is scarce, roots are deep. On Belfast's hazardous Springfield Road, the Catholic Anthony Meli family speaks for those, both Protestant and Catholic, who will not leave. "The street still feels home," says Rose Meli--even after her son Tony, 13, unwittingly triggered a crude anti-personnel bomb that blew away his right arm, half his left hand and his left eye. Springfield Road is one of the so-called sectarian interfaces, where small children, Catholic and Protestant, play on their separate sides, hurling obscenities, and worse, across the divide. "It's all very well these people saying it's coming along better," says Rose coldly. "It's working out for them, sitting there in city hall, drinking coffee. The only thing we've got in common is our lives. That's all. Our life and our death."

On Lisburn Street, Evelyn Robb, 58, a Protestant, picked through the few recognizable bits of merchandise from the sodden, charred heap that had been her draper's shop before the Proves set bombs next door. The target had been a small factory; Robb's business was an unintentioned casualty. "This is my fifth time," she said impassively. "The reason? I don't consider reason at all." She sighed heavily, "But, oh yes, I'll open again."

Still, the level of violence in Ulster did seem to be abating, until recent days. This may in part reflect a drop in American contributions "to help the widows and orphans of Ireland," which instead bought arms for the Proves. This aid, sometimes offered innocently to relieve hardship, had been estimated at some $2 million annually. This year New York Governor Hugh Carey and Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy have led a public drive to halt that flow of funds. War-weary Catholics are increasingly turning their backs on the Provos. Protestant militance also has declined, and even the activist Ulster Defense Association is beginning to talk about nonviolent solutions to the excruciating dilemma.

Austin Currie, 38, is the protesting Ulster parliamentarian whose initial sit-in at a County Tyrone public housing development sparked the civil rights movement. He now lives outside Dungannon in a house equipped with bulletproof glass, security locks, alarms and floodlights. The house, peppered with 68 bullet holes, has been attacked more than 20 times by extremists of both sides. Currie's wife Annita has been brutally beaten by intruders, who scratched UVF (for the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force) on her bosom. Says Currie: "What has happened here over the past ten years is only larger and more intense than what has happened in the past 60, or longer. The reality is that whether we like it or not, we all live on the same small island, and our political futures are bound to one another." Looking back over the decade since his housing sit-in, he observes that "the number of people who have a sneaking regard for the 'idealism' behind the violence has diminished." But, he warns, "in ten or 15 years, Lord only knows what sort of weaponry will be available to terrorists."

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