The Crying Game

By Barry Hillenbrand/London

Like a revenger's tragedy, the violence in Northern Ireland never goes unanswered. On a Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, Thomas Begley, a 23-year- old I.R.A. member, walked into Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road in Belfast carrying a Semtex bomb that exploded, probably prematurely. Nine Protestants, including Michelle Baird, 7, and Leanne Murray, 13, were killed -- along with Begley himself. The reply came three days later at 7:30 a.m. Two Protestant gunman fired long bursts from automatic weapons into a group of city sanitation workers in largely Roman Catholic West Belfast. Two Catholic men were killed; five others were wounded. More killings followed. All last week the two communities were burying their dead and waiting nervously to see where this round of violence, one of the worst in years, would lead them.

Almost certainly it will not lead to peace anytime soon. Despite the example of Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East and blacks and whites in South Africa, the 1.5 million inhabitants of Ulster seem unable to bury the hatchet unless it is in one another. Part of the reason is that despite the mounting death toll, the problem of Northern Ireland is not considered sufficiently important to hold the attention of governments in London and Dublin, where the matter of Ulster and Irish partition must ultimately be decided. "The British," says Tony Benn, a Labour M.P. in London, "are not remotely interested in the Irish. When there is no trouble in Ireland, nobody discusses it. When there is trouble, it's too dangerous to discuss."

Even in the Irish Republic, unification is far down the list of national priorities, if indeed it ranks at all. Dublin is now preoccupied with European integration and getting its economic house in order. "We in the South have become so psychologically accustomed to partition that many people refuse to have anything to do with the North," says Garret Fitzgerald, the former Irish Prime Minister who worked out the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher. That pact gave Dublin a voice in negotiations over the fate of Northern Ireland and provided a new framework for discussing a settlement. But the momentum generated by the agreement has since stalled. "Both governments are to blame for the lack of progress," says Fitzgerald.

London, which has ruled Ulster directly since 1974, would be delighted to be rid of the security problem caused by I.R.A. terrorism as well as the costs of peacekeeping and economic support in Northern Ireland, now running at an estimated $4.5 billion a year. But the political risks of cutting loose a province that has shown consistent majorities in favor of union with Britain remain too high, especially for Prime Minister John Major, who now needs the votes of the nine Protestant Unionists in the House of Commons as a cushion to defend his thin majority. And if London cannot afford to lose Ulster, Dublin cannot afford, for economic reasons, to welcome it back into a united Ireland.

As a cover for their inaction, leaders in London and Dublin blame the impasse on bloody-minded political attitudes in the North. But they also have a point. Politicians in Ulster constantly plead for peace but have shown themselves incapable of making the kind of bold moves that broke the logjam in South Africa and the Middle East. In the North "there are no autonomous political leaders strong enough to carry their followers along the road to compromise," explains Brendan O'Leary, a political scientist at the London School of Economics. "The politicians are very representative of the hard lines in their communities." Many Catholics -- and even some elements in the I.R.A. -- have moved away from their demand for unconditional British withdrawal and full union with the South. But Catholics in the North insist upon a plan that would protect their rights and link them in some way with the Republic. And there's the rub, since Protestant leaders still cling to their belief that the province's union with Britain is immutable.

The latest cycle of killings is unlikely to change much except perhaps to increase the bitterness and intensify the violence. Last week Major and Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds took time off from an E.C. summit in Brussels to discuss the crisis privately, and agreed on the urgency of continuing talks on the future of Ulster. They concurred that all parties, including the I.R.A. and Protestant terrorist groups, could take part in negotiations if they ceased their terror campaigns. Before the Shankill bombing, John Hume, M.P. from Ulster, and Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., had been discussing a new agenda for a peace plan. That was an indication that perhaps the I.R.A. had had enough of the killing game. But when Adams appeared as a pallbearer at bomber Begley's funeral, optimism faded. It now looks very much as if the killers are back in the driver's seat, and the road ahead is as murky as ever.

With reporting by Edmund Curran/Belfast