ULSTER: ENGULFED IN SECTARIAN STRIFE

TRAILING jets of bright orange flame, gasoline fire bombs arched across barricades that sealed off the dreary Catholic slum of Bogside from the rest of Londonderry. As the bombs exploded among groups of Northern Ireland's constabulary, setting some men afire, the police raised their billy clubs and beat a sharp tattoo on their riot shields. That was the signal to charge. Repeatedly, the police slashed into the mobs, but each time the Catholics drove them back across the barricades. "We've had 50 years of it--the System," hissed a leathery middle-aged man. "It should be ended this time, once and for all."

Last week, beneath the fortress where Protestants and Catholics fought one another 280 years ago, religious warfare erupted again in Northern Ireland. In the worst outbreak of sectarian violence since Ulster was severed from the newly partitioned Irish Free State in 1921, bitterly divided Catholics and Protestants battled one another first with rocks, then with Molotov cocktails, and finally with savage gunfire. Despite the deployment of British troops, the first to be used against Irish rioters since the Black and Tans of half a century ago, armed clashes spread swiftly to at least ten cities and towns. At week's end, in a conflict that bordered on civil war, nine were dead and nearly 500 injured.

Unequal Treatment. Relations between Ulster's 1,000,000 Protestants and its Catholic minority of 500,000 have been severely strained ever since Northern Ireland was separated from the South. In the past ten months, however, sectarian bitterness has mounted, as Catholics intensified their protest against a system that had always shortchanged them in housing, employment and voting. It was a system that changed glacially, since it has been dominated by the Protestant-run Union Party and a Protestant oligarchy. Ironically, the Protestants were at last beginning to meet Catholic demands.

Though the Catholic leadership has been encouraged by the progress already made through protest politics, for some Catholics the issue had gone far beyond civil rights. They were openly calling on the Republic to help them. Protestants, for their part, grew more suspicious than ever that the rioting was a "popish" plot to reunite the two Irelands. Though such a solution is unlikely, the bloody outbursts raised the question of whether Northern Ireland could endure under its present government. Prime Minister Major James Chichester-Clark referred to the crisis as "our darkest hour."

Free-for-AII. That crisis might well have been averted by Chichester-Clark himself. After two outbreaks of violence in the past month, both Catholic and Protestant moderates called on him to ban sectarian demonstrations, including last week's annual parade to celebrate the end of the Catholic siege of Londonderry in 1689 (see box). In past years the parade, sponsored by the militantly Protestant Orange Order, has frequently deteriorated into a virulent, Catholic-baiting free-for-all. Chichester-Clark chose not to cancel the parade.

Busloads of Orangemen poured into Londonderry, bedecked with bowler hats and crimson sashes and carrying banners bearing portraits of William of Orange. When the parade reached the Catholic slum of Bogside, youths who had massed behind police barriers began pelting the band-playing, jig-dancing "Prods" with rocks. The police and Prods threw rocks back, and the fight was on.

Bogsiders erected barricades of overturned vehicles and debris. Teen-agers and young adults scrambled onto rooftops and rained gasoline bombs down on the police. Children squatted in the dirt making the missiles, one bunch rounding up empty pop bottles, another filling them with gasoline and stuffing in rag wicks. The mood bordered on insurrection. From the roof of a ten-story public-housing development fluttered the tricolor of the Irish Republic, the blue plough-and-stars banner of the 1916 Irish rebels and, for a time, a U.S. flag.

Bernadette's Bark. On the barricades, dressed in jeans and boots, stood Ulster's own La Pasionaria: M. P. Bernadette Devlin, 22, who won election to the British Parliament last spring on a platform of equality for Catholics. "Let all men prepare to defend their homes," she barked into a bullhorn. "Women and children must be taken out of the area."

Night after night, the fighting spread until, as one Catholic member of Northern Ireland's Parliament put it, the government was dealing "not with riots but with an uprising." By far the most savage fighting occurred in the capital, Belfast, where the explosion of gasoline bombs was counterpointed by the sharp crackle of gunfire. As police told it, they returned shots in self-defense only. But on the first night of shooting, by official count, only three police were wounded, while four civilians died from gunshot wounds and 47 were injured. One of the dead was a nine-year-old Catholic boy, shot as he huddled inside his family's home while street warfare raged outside.

No Pope Here. The worst damage, reported TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast from Belfast, was visited on the dismal back streets that serve as borders between rows of Protestant and Catholic shanties, identical except for the telltale daubings on the walls: "No Pope here" on one side of the street, "Up the I.R.A." [for Irish Republican Army] on the other. The stunned residents of Conway Street claimed that Protestant gangs had swept down on their homes with fire bombs. Behind them stood 41 gutted houses, side by side. From Protestant territory at the next corner, a white-haired Protestant grandmother, 70, whose grocery store and home had been burned down last month, boasted: "I got me own back last night."

Across the border, Premier Jack Lynch of the Irish Republic claimed that Northern Ireland's authorities had lost control and called on the United Nations to intervene -- a demand that was unlikely to get very far. Lynch also ordered military medical units to set up field hospitals on the border to treat wounded Catholics who refused to be treated in Northern hospitals.

Halfway House. Appearing on television, Chichester-Clark denounced "sinister elements -- anarchists and others" for starting the fighting. Two days later, voicing the deep Protestant suspicion that any British help would lead to a loss of majority control, he warned Parliament: "Those who cry so loudly for British intervention see it as a halfway house to the long-sought goal of an Irish Republic."

Nonetheless, it became clear that the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which numbers only 3,000 men, was incapable of restoring order. The hasty call-up of 11,000 police auxiliaries only worsened matters; Catholics consider them little more than armed Protestants. Finally Chichester-Clark had an urgent telephone conversation with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Breaking off a vacation at his Scilly Islands retreat, Wilson helicoptered to a Royal Navy base in Cornwall for a three-hour conference with Home Secretary James Callaghan, who holds responsibility for Ulster.

Though he was well aware that Irish politics proved the graveyard of many a 19th century British government, Wilson reluctantly moved 300 troops into Londonderry, followed by an airlift of 600 to Belfast. By week's end, with the "full consent" of the Ulster government, an additional 1,000 British reinforcements were put on alert to move into Northern Ireland. Ulster, for all intents and purposes, had turned itself over to the foreign peacekeepers.

The most immediate problem was to restore order. There were hints that Chichester-Clark might decide to invoke Northern Ireland's Special Powers Act, which could enable police to undertake mass arrests and detentions. At best, however, such wholesale roundups could lead to nothing more than a temporary cooling-off period. At worst, since most police are Protestants, they could simply compound Catholic panic and resentment. Britain's direct involvement in its new Irish "troubles," belated and reluctant as it was, provided the only measure of relief. That involvement may well increase substantially, and perhaps indefinitely, before any kind of normalcy can return to sundered Northern Ireland.

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