TROUBLE IN THE LAND OF ORANGE

IF politics in Northern Ireland has a quaintly archaic tone, it is probably because the issues have not changed much since 1690. In that year, the English armies of William of Orange trounced the Irish Catholic troops of James II on the banks of the Boyne River and established Protestant ascendancy over all Ireland, including the six counties that constitute Ulster. Ever since--and particularly after Southern Ireland went its Catholic way--Ulster's leaders have been preoccupied with safeguarding the Christian Reformation. William's picture is still painted on the red brick wall of many a Protestant home in Belfast, along with slogans like "No Pope Here." Protestant extremists have taken lately to insulting Catholic women with a new shout: "Ee-aya-addio, you can't take the pill!"

The taunt may be fresh, but the sentiment is not. Having governed their country as a virtual Protestant theocracy since Ireland was partitioned in 1920, the Orangemen of the North pay scant heed to Catholic feelings or, often, to Catholic rights. The Unionist Party monopolized the central government at Storemont from the first, and it has kept power--including voting power--in the hands of the Protestant haves. Businessmen, for example, command up to six votes each in local elections. Nor do the burdens of a chronically weak economy fall equally: unemployment in some Catholic areas runs as high as one person out of six, double the national level.

The Catholics (who number 500,000 in a population of 1,500,000) have chafed with increasing bitterness under this arrangement. Through the years, clashes between Protestants and Catholics--especially in the capital of Belfast --have drawn enough Irish temper from both sides to make "Belfast confetti" a second name for paving stones. During the past five months, the bitterness has erupted almost weekly in a wave of demonstrations, street riots and vigilantism. The unrest has presented the country's moderate Prime Minister, Captain Terence O'Neill, with his toughest problem and most serious political challenge in six years.

The Oligarchic Order. The conflict, as always, has strongly religious overtones. But because the central issue involves civil rights at the local level, it has become a cause not only for Catholic activists but also for New Left militants, Communists and even a few liberal Protestants. Last summer near the town of Dungannon, a 29-year-old opposition M.P. named Austin Currie staged a sit-in to protest the assignment of a family flat to the unmarried teenage secretary of a Unionist bigwig. The protest quickly spread to Londonderry, where a system of blatant gerrymandering has resulted in the two-thirds Catholic majority's getting only one-third of the public-built housing; it eventually turned into a nationwide campaign for reapportionment and for the "one-man, one-vote" principle.

Among ordinary Ulster citizens, there was considerable sympathy for some of the reform demands. O'Neill, a patrician, soft-spoken former Irish Guards captain who has been Prime Minister since 1963, was already trying to parlay that sympathy into a vote of confidence in his gradual program for equality. But when activist demonstrators began joining the protest ranks, extremist groups within O'Neill's Unionist Party reacted violently. Among the first to express its ire was the oligarchic Orange Order, a powerful political-religious society whose members have included all Prime Ministers and virtually every Cabinet Minister in Northern Ireland's history. Like others, it has been particularly skillful in playing on the fears of Orangemen that all Catholics secretly want "to do away with the border" and rejoin Eire, despite a recent poll showing that 70% of Ulster's Catholics favor some form of continuing association with Britain.

For Protestants, perhaps the most galling provocation came last October when Catholic marchers paraded within Londonderry's Old Walls, a Unionist shrine. Convinced that the protesters had overstepped all bounds, Protestant bigots soon began organizing counterdemonstrations. Their spokesman was fiery Ian Paisley, leader of the extremist Free Presbyterian Church, who rarely misses an opportunity to vent his rabidly anti-Catholic views. He refers to the Roman Catholic church as "the greatest dictatorship in the world," and his newspaper has come up with the singular suggestion that the Viet Nam war is a Jesuit conspiracy.

Fenian Bastards. Paisley's chief bad-german was a blustery ex-Royal Engineers officer named Major Ralph Bunting, who had been attached to a number of far-out political causes before teaming up with Paisley a year ago. Bunting's Boys soon began laying in wait for protest marchers, first to block their path and later to knock heads. Over New Year's, they bird-dogged a line of student demonstrators on a four-day, 75-mile protest walk from Belfast to Londonderry. On the final day, they ambushed the students, who reached their goal with 81 injured. That night, Londonderry's police--many of them Paisley sympathizers--staged a raid on Bogside, the Catholic slum area. They beat passersby, smashed windows and shouted into darkened houses, "Come out, you Fenian bastards." Catholics responded by setting up vigilante patrols to protect themselves, closing off their section of the city to normal traffic.

At an emergency Cabinet meeting two weeks later, O'Neill promised to severely limit demonstrations and bear down hard on lawbreakers from either side. He also proposed a high-level commission to look into what caused the violence, a move that Catholic Leader Currie hailed as the harbinger of "British democracy here." His followers and Bunting called off plans for further demonstrations, though Paisley last week carried his campaign to St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where he was pelted with oranges, to demonstrate against an appearance there by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster.

Noisy Campaign. O'Neill has firmly established his credentials as an honorable, if plodding, moderate. When the controversy was heating up last fall, he scathingly denounced extremists of his own party as "lunatics who would set a course that could only lead to an all-Ireland Republic." When Home Affairs Minister William Craig resisted O'Neill's efforts for reform, the Prime Minister sacked him. Last week the Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, turned in his resignation and accused O'Neill of allowing the party "to tear itself to pieces." Unfortunately for those of good will, the attitude of Craig, Faulkner and other Unionist hard-liners has already frayed the fabric of all of Northern Ireland.

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