Proves on the Run

Armored cars and tanks and guns.

Came to take away our sons.

The Catholic ballad, written at the time of the Ulster government's first internment of Irish Republican Army suspects a year ago, seemed especially pertinent again. Northern Ireland was still shaking from the I.R.A. Provisional Wing's "Bloody Friday" assault on Belfast (TIME, July 31). Last week British soldiers took the offensive. Discarding the army's "low profile" policy, troops invaded such Catholic strongholds as Belfast's Andersonstown and Ballymurphy districts and rounded up hundreds of men for questioning. Giant bulldozers ripped through the iron-pylon barricades that had marked many Catholic enclaves. In Belfast's narrow Keenan Street, the soldiers discovered a complete bomb factory, 420 lbs. of gelignite, sodium nitrate, detonators and fuse wire.

"At dawn last Tuesday," reported TIME Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer, "an army patrol in the Turf Lodge area brought in what looked like much of the arms stock of C Company, 1st Battalion of the I.R.A.'s Belfast Brigade, complete with a framed coat of arms giving the company commander's nom de guerre as Martin Forsythe. A patrol had entered the house on Norglen Crescent shortly after 2 a.m. A boy opened the door and immediately admitted that arms were hidden inside. Sure enough, twelve rifles were neatly stacked in a cupboard, and about 6,000 rounds of ammunition were stashed away beneath the bed of an elderly invalid."

Enraged Catholics. In Belfast's Rossnareen district, hundreds of children swarmed around three British Saladin armored cars, throwing rocks, bottles and homemade bombs. The Saracens careened through glass-littered streets, occasionally shooting rubber bullets from slits in their armor. Their arrival after nightfall was greeted by a din of children's warning whistles. Groups of women beat out tomtom rhythms with garbage cans to protest the army's presence--and the British failure to challenge the Protestant "nogo" areas set up by the militant Ulster Defense Association.

The tough new British policy was described by William Whitelaw, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, as an effort to "root out the I.R.A. and destroy their capacity for further acts of inhumanity." It was undoubtedly made practicable by the fact that Bloody Friday had enraged many Catholics as well as Protestants. Informants in Catholic neighborhoods tipped off the soldiers to the location of arms caches. One unit of the I.R.A.'s Marxist-linked Official Wing went so far as to denounce the Proves as "the enemy of the people."

Once more on the run, Seamus

Twomey, the Provo commander in the Belfast area, insisted that the I.R.A. had given the British army plenty of warning before the Bloody Friday bombings. But one seemingly disillusioned Provo sympathizer retorted that the army could not possibly have coped with so many bomb warnings in a single afternoon. Many Ulstermen believed that Twomey's motive in ordering the bombing attack, which killed nine and wounded 130, had been to prevent his Dublin-based superiors from putting out any more peace feelers.

In the end the Proves got exactly the opposite of what they wanted: a full-scale search-and-seizure operation, followed by continuous army patrolling of Catholic strongholds. Through such measures, Whitelaw hopes to reduce the level of violence (which last week claimed seven more lives and included twelve more bombings). To reinforce its new policy, the British government sent an additional 4,000 troops to Northern Ireland, boosting its total force there to a record 21,000. Their first mission may well be an attack on I.R.A. sanctuaries in Londonderry's Creggan and Bogside districts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.