Ulster: Steering Toward Civil War?

"We believe Ireland is one country, one nation, one people. I think it is both small enough and big enough to live together. Ireland was one for centuries and was divided only in the last 50 years."

SO said John Lynch, Prime Minister of the Irish Republic, after two days of emergency talks with British Prime Minister Edward Heath. Held at Chequers, the country residence of Britain's Prime Ministers, the meetings dealt with the current civil strife in the British province of Northern Ireland. The talks did nothing to bring Ireland's Catholic South and Protestant North any closer to union. But they did produce an unprecedented concession from the British government: an invitation to the Irish Prime Minister to participate in tripartite discussions with Heath and Northern Ireland's Prime Minister Brian Faulkner over the critical situation in Ulster.

In a parallel move, British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling invited representatives of Ulster's Catholic community to a round-table conference with the province's Protestant leaders. The conference's purpose: to consider reforms that would give the Catholics (who constitute about one-third of Ulster's 1,500,000 population) "an active, permanent and guaranteed role in the life and public affairs of the province." Maudling specified, however, that the conference would not discuss "the constitutional position of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom"--a reassurance to Ulster's Protestants, who nervously scrutinize any dealings between London and Dublin for signs of a "sellout" of the province.

In Jeopardy. It was Ulster's Catholics, however, not its Protestants, who placed the British-sponsored round-table talks in jeopardy. Both of the province's two main opposition parties rejected any such meeting until the Protestant-dominated Stormont government rescinds the internment of 250 Catholic militants who have been jailed without trial for over a month. Bernadette Devlin, who was back on the political stump for the first time since her daughter was born out of wedlock three weeks ago, declared she had "no intention of discussing anything with Maudling until every last man who is at present interned has been released." But one leading Catholic moderate condemned his coreligionists' refusal to attend talks. "We are on the verge of the most appalling bloodshed," said Oliver Napier, vice chairman of the nonsectarian Alliance Party, "and yet you are not prepared to get around a table and discuss issues on which many lives may depend. You are steering straight toward civil war."

"Third Force." Not that Ulster's Orangemen were exactly waving the olive branch. Cries mounted last week for an armed "third force"--in addition to the British army and the overwhelmingly Protestant but unarmed Royal Ulster Constabulary--to fight the terrorists of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. One afternoon, in Ulster's largest hard-hat demonstration to date, over 20,000 Protestant workers assembled in a Belfast park to hear calls for "lead bullets, not rubber ones"--a reference to the rubber bullets the British soldiers use in trying to restore order. The crowd cheered wildly as the Rev. Ian Paisley, the province's Protestant firebrand, flailed the air and announced formation among Protestant loyalists of a civil defense corps.

With gun ownership rising steadily, the possibility of civil war is not simply an alarmist's dream. As of last April, there were more than 102,000 licensed firearms--everything from farmers' shotguns to automatic weapons--held by some 73,000 Ulstermen, practically all of them Protestant. How many additional smuggled weapons are being held illegally by both sides is anybody's guess. An immediate ban on all privately held firearms in Ulster is one of the twelve points advocated by British Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson. The Labor opposition in Westminster has also been demanding that the government recall Parliament for an emergency debate on Northern Ireland. Last week Ted Heath responded by announcing a two-day parliamentary session later this month--additional evidence that he is relying less and less on the Ulster government in seeking a solution.

Many Britons are convinced, however, that the efforts made so far are nothing but "whitewash on the sepulcher," as the left-wing weekly New Statesman put it--that Northern Ireland, in short, cannot survive in its present form. To be sure, the question was whether the week's political moves were too little and too late. The proposals for tripartite prime-ministerial talks for the all-Ulster round-table conference and for the two-day debate in Commons--or even Faulkner's hint at week's end of other concessions--might not be in time to reverse the upward spiral of violence. "No night passes without sporadic bombings and snipings, no day without bomb scares," TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast reported from Belfast last week. "On downtown streets there are almost as many armored cars as city buses. Steel mesh is going up over more and more shop windows.

Guards at government offices keep street doors locked and check callers in and out like jailers."

As the week began. 18-month-old Angela Gallagher, killed by a ricocheting bullet fired by a sniper at a British army patrol, was buried in a tiny coffin. By week's end, the toll since the crisis first erupted in August 1969 stood at 102. The latest victims: a British officer who was attempting to defuse a bomb, a three-year-old Belfast boy hit by an armored truck and a 14-year-old Catholic schoolgirl named Annette McCavigan. She had been sent home early because of a bomb threat, and as she strolled along the Bogside's narrow streets, still wearing her gym shoes and sucking a lollipop, she was caught in a crossfire between I.R.A. gunmen and British troops. A bullet struck her in the neck, killing her instantly.

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