Tit-for-Tat Murder

Shootout at the abbey

Inside their turreted, Norman-style abbey in Ulster's County Armagh one evening last week, Sir Norman Stronge, 86, and his son James, 48, had just retired to the library after dinner. The baronet, once speaker of the Northern Ireland Parliament and a former head of the Black Order (a staunch Protestant group), was relaxing in his ancestral home when suddenly the great wooden doors of the 18th century castle were blasted open by a violent explosion. Through the breach burst eight gunmen. The masked and heavily armed terrorists shot the victims through their heads, set off incendiary bombs that burned Tynan Abbey to a shell and fled --right into the gun sights of waiting police, who had been alerted by the blasts.

After a fierce gun battle of about ten minutes, the assassins abandoned their cars and escaped on foot across the nearby frontier of the Irish Republic. At week's end they were still at large, despite an all-out security operation mounted on both sides of the border.

The Provisional I.R.A. quickly claimed responsibility for the killings. A spokesman in Belfast said that the attack was a reprisal for a series of "assassinations and murder attacks on nationalist people." Specifically, the killings were believed to be in revenge for the shooting, a week earlier, of Catholic Activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and her husband Michael. Devlin and her husband survived, but were reported still in serious condition in a Belfast hospital.

The murders, with all their similarities to the I.R.A.'s killing of Lord Mountbatten in August 1979, drew condemnation from moderates on both sides of the sectarian struggle. "Even at 86 years of age," said Catholic Politician Austin Currie, "Sir Norman was still incomparably more of a man than the cowardly dregs of humanity who ended his life in this barbaric way." Still, the violence seemed to signal a new round of tit-for-tat murders. Last week the Ulster Defense Association, a Protestant paramilitary organization, warned Protestants to fight "this conspiracy to destroy our homeland."

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