The Making of a Martyr

THE angry fates attending Northern Ireland conspired again last week to plunge that unhappy province back over the brink of violence. For nearly a month since Britain's takeover of direct rule, Ulster's Catholics had wavered between supporting the outlawed Irish Republican Army and coming to terms with the British. But the nascent good will toward London for replacing the hated Protestant-dominated Parliament at Stormont was clearly a fragile feeling. Almost any incident could spark a renewed flare-up of hatred in the Catholic community--and last week, with a certain inevitability, that flare-up was touched off. By a single death, the I.R.A. gained a martyr, and the British were put on the verge of losing their latest bid to bring peace to bloody Ulster.

The dead man was Joseph McCann, 25, commander of the first battalion of the I.R.A.'s Marxist-leaning Official wing in Belfast. A semilegendary hero to the I.R.A. gunmen, he had eluded capture by the British for more than two years--a fact that spawned his nickname, "Joe the Fox." It was said that he had shot as many as 15 British soldiers. McCann's luck ran out when police plainclothesmen spotted him in a narrow Belfast thoroughfare called Joy Street. As he tried to run, he was shot and killed by soldiers.

Catholic eyewitnesses contended that McCann--who was unarmed at the time--was first shot in the legs and then murdered, with at least ten shots pumped into his body. The British army declined comment, pending an inquest.

Public Drama. The I.R.A. extracted a maximum of public drama from his funeral. Gunmen patrolled the Turf Lodge area of West Belfast where McCann's body lay in state in an apartment. The Irish News ran an entire page of messages of sympathy, many from interned I.R.A. fighters. An estimated 2,000 mourners--including black-bereted I.R.A. fighters and uniformed girls of the Fianna na Eireann, a sort of junior I.R.A.--marched in the funeral cortege, while another 3,000 watched from the sidewalks. Civil Rights Firebrand Bernadette Devlin, who had been sentenced in absentia the day before to six months in jail for taking part in an illegal march in February (but still had 14 days to appeal), turned up to march in the procession.

McCann was buried in an I.R.A. plot in Belfast's big Catholic cemetery, next to the graves of two teen-agers who were killed when a bomb they were making exploded last year. Around the grave was a huge pile of flowers, and all 21 I.R.A. companies stood silently at attention as a bugler sounded the Last Post. Cathal Goulding, the Dublin-based chief of staff of the I.R.A. Officials, delivered the funeral oration. Clad in a red sweater, his long hair blowing in the breeze, Goulding declaimed that McCann had been "shot like a dog by the agents of imperialism."

In revenge for McCann's death, I.R.A. snipers killed three British soldiers, and set off a new upsurge of violence. In all, there were more than 250 shooting incidents last week. Most of them were apparently begun by the Official wing of the I.R.A., which prefers bullets to bombs, the favorite tactical weapon of the Provisionals. In one particularly grisly act, a corporal in the Ulster Defense Regiment, the largely Protestant provincial militia, was kidnaped and murdered, and his body booby-trapped with 475 Ibs. of explosives (a British bomb-disposal squad successfully dismantled the devices). In addition, two teen-age girls who are engaged to British soldiers were abducted by I.R.A. women, shorn of their hair, and daubed with paint and feathers.

As the level of violence soared, pessimists feared that McCann's death might prove to be a milestone like Jan. 30, when 13 Catholics at a demonstration were killed by British troops. "Bloody Sunday" fueled the winter's worst rash of bombings and eventually led the British to impose direct rule. Reporting last week on his inquiry into that sorry episode, Britain's Lord Chief Justice Lord Widgery blamed the Catholic civil rights demonstrators for creating a "highly dangerous situation" with their illegal march, and some of the troops for action that "bordered on the reckless." But he judged that the first shot had come from a sniper and, on evidence from laboratory tests, that at least five of the dead had either fired weapons or been near someone who had done so, although no firearms were found on any of the bodies. Lord Widgery also ruled that at least four of the victims had been shot "without justification." But he found no evidence of conspiracy to kill on the part of the British troops, and "no general breakdown" in discipline.

The Widgery Report, which British ministers hailed as "vindication" for the army, further flamed the tempers of Ulster Catholics, who called it a whitewash. Nothing would shake their conviction that British troops had shot down unarmed civilians without provocation. Bernadette Devlin saw Widgery as "the latest in a long line of British establishment liars." Nationalist Party Leader Eddie McAteer scoffed that "we were lucky he did not also find that the 13 committed suicide." All of which meant that the British government once again faced a crisis of confidence in its relations with Ulster's half million angry Catholics.

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