Friday, May. 02, 1969

NORTHERN IRELAND: EDGING TOWARD ANARCHY

THE six Ulster counties that form Northern Ireland shuddered on the edge of civil war last week. Nearly every city and town was divided into two armed camps, as fanatic Protestants and rebellious Catholics faced each other down, ready to do street battle with stones, staves and worse. Skillful saboteurs triggered three explosions that cut Belfast's water supply in half. Post offices and a bus station were set aflame by fire bombs; police stations were stoned. Ten-year-olds trotted home from school with extracurricular instructions for making Molotov cocktails. More than 1,000 British soldiers moved into position throughout Ulster to protect reservoirs, telephone exchanges and power stations. Moderate Prime Minister Captain Terence O'Neill's days in office seemed numbered as extremism mounted. "We are on the brink of bloodshed," former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Faulkner warned. "Perhaps this is our last chance to halt on the brink, before anyone is killed."

The conflict has its origins deep in Irish history, but nearly all the present participants own at least a share of the blame. On one side are the Protestant storm troopers of the Rev. Ian Paisley, who is now serving a six-month prison term for illegal assembly last November. On the other stand the angry Roman Catholics, Ulster's impoverished and politically disenfranchised minority. Aiding them, and drawing most of their support from the Catholics, are the civil rights advocates, who espouse a non-sectarian solution to Ulster's problems. Their banner was carried to the House of Commons in London last week by pint-sized, pugnacious Bernadette Devlin in as memorable an M.P.'s debut as any one could remember. Caught squarely in the middle is the government of Captain O'Neill, whose efforts toward reaching compromise and conciliation are considered too little and too late by the Catholics and civil rightists alike--and too much too soon by his increasingly reactionary Unionist Party of entrenched Protestants.

From the Barricades. Since last fall there have been a series of increasingly bitter street battles in Northern Ireland's two major cities, Belfast and Londonderry, and smaller but equally bloody clashes in villages as well. The latest round of strife began in Londonderry, which is Ulster's second largest city, with a population of 56,000, two-thirds Catholic. Youthful civil rights supporters staged a noon sit-down in the city's center, and a band of taunting Paisleyites appeared. When the youths tried to chase away their tormentors, the Paisleyites responded with stones, waving the Union Jack. The police swung into action, charging the civil rightists, flailing away with batons as they tried to force the demonstrators back into a Catholic part of the city known as Bogside.

Bogside, where 5,000 Catholics live, is a squalid slum of crumbling two-story buildings jammed into a valley that was once an enormous swamp. Its poverty-encrusted homes are forever damp, and a veil of smog coats the area. It is a place where the city's mostly Protestant police "do what they like," say sullen residents. This night they did, using batons and water cannons furiously in the narrow streets, as the Bogsiders fought back ferociously. Bricks ricocheted off buildings or disintegrated shop windows. Petrol bombs bounced and flared in the glass-shard-littered streets. One crowd attacked a police station and another overturned a police truck and set it afire. Though 290 were wounded in the fray, miraculously no one died.

In the thick of the melee was Bernadette, newly elected M.P. from Ulster, and she went straight from the barricades to her maiden appearance in the House of Commons. Her plane from Belfast was delayed by a bomb scare, and she arrived exhausted but fighting. She landed with the proclamation that she had come "to knock sense into Harold Wilson." The British press had already made her a celebrity, and Westminster was packed, with long waiting lines outside, when Bernadette, in a new, striped blue, mauve and green sweater-dress purchased that morning in Piccadilly, took her seat in the back benches.

Eloquent Litany. New members are not supposed to make serious speeches their first day in Parliament, but in an assembly captivated by her before she ever opened her mouth, no rules applied. Her small peat-bog Irish voice twanged through the great hall as she tartly announced: "There never was born an Englishman who understands the Irish people." She had come, she said, to speak for the poor people, Protestant as well as Catholic, all oppressed by "the society of landlords who, by ancient charter of Charles II, still hold the rights of the ordinary people of Northern Ireland over such things as fishing and as paying the most ridiculous and exorbitant rents, although families have lived for generations on their land." She reported that she had been in Bogside the night of the battle and drew a delighted explosion of laughter when she wryly noted that "I organized the civilians in that area to make sure they wasted not one solitary stone in anger."

It was an eloquent, 24-minute litany of Ulster's tangled ills and animosities, and when she sat down, the M.P.s roared their approval, waving their order papers like banners, reaching out to pump her hand wildly or scribbling notes to be passed to her. In a debating chamber not often moved by words, Bernadette's had banged like Bogside paving stones. But the next night, in the privacy of her 22nd-birthday dinner, she was wistful about the loss of her days of innocence as a student protester in blue jeans and bulky sweater. "I believe standing for this Parliament destroyed something in myself. Then why did I do it? The people in Ireland needed a moral victory."

One-Man, One-Vote. That Bernadette had undeniably given the Catholics and civil rightists. But she had offered little in the way of positive solutions. Back in Belfast, O'Neill was trying to defuse the crisis. Calling a Unionist Party caucus, he demanded that the voting franchise be broadened to eliminate property qualifications in local elections. Catholics, generally poorer than Protestants in Ulster, have long agitated for a one-man, one-vote ruling. Now, argued O'Neill, they must be granted it to avoid further bloodshed. By a narrow margin he won the point, but the motion must still go through the entire party mechanism and then Ulster's Parliament, and there is no guarantee that it will pass. If the measure does not, O'Neill says he will resign.

Catholics might well be worse off than before if he does. For all the Catholic criticism of O'Neill, the fact is that he has done his best to alleviate several grievances. He has, for example, worked diligently to make allocation of new housing--a longstanding Catholic grievance--more equitable, and he has pressed hard for the appointment of an ombudsman to investigate complaints against the national government. In Londonderry, the all-Protestant city corporation and rural council were abolished this year in favor of a city council that includes five Protestants and four Catholics. In addition, some of the voting practices that in the past have stacked the odds against Catholics have been discontinued.

Despite O'Neill's efforts, the civil rights faction feels that he has moved too slowly. In London, Bernadette made no secret of her mistrust of O'Neill: "He is not only a political hypocrite, but a particularly poor political hypocrite." The Unionists will never carry out reforms, she said, because the party survives on discrimination and "by introducing the human rights bill, it signs its own death warrant." That, of course, is indeed O'Neill's dilemma in dealing with the reactionaries in his own party--and part and parcel of Northern Ireland's once and present agony.

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