Return to Tar and Feathers

As shoppers hurried home at dusk, they were startled to see two young men, aged 18 and 19, being marched through Belfast's Falls Road slum, heavily populated by Catholics. A group of angry members of the I.R.A. (the outlawed Irish Republican Army) tied the two boys to a lamppost and poured cold tar varnish and feathers over their shaved heads. Placards tied around the victims' necks proclaimed; "This man has been found guilty and confessed to breaking and entering. This sentence has been passed by the Republican movement."

Such punishment dates to the twelfth century, when miscreant Crusaders serving under Richard Coeur de Lion were doused with hot pitch and then feathered. It has since been associated with America's Ku Klux Klan, but the fact is that the I.R.A. routinely used it through the 1930s. Disturbed by the rising crime in Falls Road, where the predominantly Protestant police force rarely dares to tread, the I.R.A. decided to revive the punishment for lawbreakers. So did a more militant "provisional" faction of the underground army, which sprang up during the 1969 rioting throughout Northern Ireland.

To show that they were as capable of meting out kangaroo justice as the "official" I.R.A., the "provisionals" last week dragged a 20-year-old man from a pub, allegedly for pushing drugs, then tarred and feathered him and chained him to a park fence. They also accused an English ex-soldier of "interfering with women" and tarred him outside Belfast.

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