The Protestants Strike for Power

They say it is the fatal destiny of Ireland that no purposes whatever which are meant for her good will prosper or take effect.

--Edmund Spenser

Spenser's grim comment was written 400 years ago, but the Irish drama seems to be eternal. The latest chapter in this unhappy story ended last week when the Executive, Northern Ireland's fragile coalition government of Protestants and Catholics, folded under the pressure of a devastating two-week general strike that had been called to preserve Protestant hegemony in Ulster. With the province near collapse, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was forced to reimpose direct rule from London, and British Tommies once again were on the alert to prevent Irishmen from killing Irishmen.

With the end of Brian Faulkner's five-month-old government, hopes for harmony between Catholics and Protestants were ended, and the prospect was for still more of the sectarian violence that has dominated Ulster for the last five years. Said Faulkner as he gave up his office: "It is the saddest day of my life and for the country I love. Today I fear we are the despair of our friends and the mockery of our enemies."

A Nervous Breakdown. Between the intransigence of the Protestants and the bumbling of Britain's Labor government there was, however, little chance for moderates like Faulkner. The Protestants, who make up about two-thirds of Ulster's population, were angry at having been maneuvered by London into sharing power with the Catholic minority. They also feared that cooperation in Ulster would eventually lead to union with the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland--a political marriage that would instantly turn their majority into a minority.

"It was almost like a nervous breakdown," said David Bleakley, a moderate Protestant. "All the little symbols of Protestant order have been going one by one, all the divinely enduring things of ordinary life and their traditions." When Britain's new government failed to heed the signals of the breakdown and offer any kind of remedy, Protestant laborers, organized into an ad hoc group called the Ulster Workers Council, began walking off their jobs on May 14 as an act of defiance.

Actually, not even the leaders of the U.W.C. expected that the strike would be successful enough to bring down the Faulkner coalition. Day by day, however, more and more workers stayed away from their jobs, and both industry and domestic services slowed to a near halt. Grocery stores ran out of food, ser vice stations emptied their gasoline tanks, and electric power was cut to one-fourth of normal output. By the end of two weeks, the strikers were so fully in control that they were regulating what little rural commerce remained and had stopped the refueling of airplanes at airports. As an added macabre touch, they even ordered gravediggers to stop burying the dead.

Fear of reprisals was a major reason for the strike's success. In the country town of Ballymena, two Catholic brothers who kept their pub open in defiance of the strike were murdered by a group of more than 30 hooded men. Finally, last week, the power workers threatened a total blackout, which would have stopped pumps at all water and sewage plants. Faced with the prospect of no running water in homes and hospitals and raw sewage flowing through the streets, Faulkner's government called it quits.

With 16,500 troops in Northern Ireland, Britain could have ordered the army to take over essential services at the beginning. Instead, Merlyn Rees, London's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, decided to wait out the strike. He assumed that the people, after a sufficient period of deprivation, would turn against the workers. It was a total misreading of the popular mood. Every day there were Protestant rallies and parades with cries of "No surrender!"

Prime Minister Wilson compounded Rees's error and stiffened Protestant resolve by going on television to call the strikers "thugs and bullies," and accuse them of "sponging on Westminster and British democracy." The Rev. Ian Paisley, one of the most militant Protestant leaders, immediately appended a sponge from his buttonhole, and some Protestants impaled sponges on their car antennas. "Wilson didn't talk to us and he didn't break us," said John Taylor, a key Protestant leader, with obvious contempt. "He didn't do either. He just called us names. He's played into our hands."

In Protestant neighborhoods the fall of the Faulkner government was greeted with the kind of delirious jubilation that marks a great wartime triumph. Bonfires were lighted in the streets, and huge victory parades marched with the red and white flags of Ulster whipping in the spring wind. Within two hours after the strike was called off, the province was alive again: hundreds of shoppers queued up outside stores in Belfast, and long lines of red city buses began taking commuters in and out of the city. Ulster's industry expects to be able to restore full production early this week. Roared an ecstatic Paisley: "We have secured the downfall of tyranny!"

With their first goal secured--the end of a coalition with the Catholics --the militant Protestants now want a new provincial election that will guarantee them control of the province. But Protestant rule would merely restore the

I situation that caused the Catholic Irish P Republican Army to begin its campaign of terror in 1969. Wilson will undoubtedly be reluctant to go back to the point at which the troubles started.

The Catholics have yet to act, but their mood is already one of anger. They feel betrayed by the British, whom they had counted on to protect their interests. They also feel that Rees should have used troops earlier to break the strike and save the coalition. Demanded a Catholic spokesman: "What's the logic of incarcerating one set of extremists [the I.R.A.] and not another?"

A Psychic Wound. In fact, there were signs last week that the militant Provisional wing of the I.R.A. was considering breaking its own two-week-old de facto cease-fire to support a campaign within the Catholic community for the return of Dolours and Marion Price, two sisters who were jailed last November for their role in the Old Bailey bombings in London. The sisters have been on a hunger strike since their imprisonment; reportedly, they are now so weak that they have been given last rites.

In such Catholic ghettos as Belfast's Falls Road district and Londonderry's Bogside, there is a renewed spirit of hatred toward Protestants, who are taking every opportunity to flaunt their newly restored power. "Right's on our side," proclaimed Protestant Leader Harry West. "We are the majority."

Increasingly wearied by the seemingly inexhaustible hatred in Northern Ireland, a psychic wound beyond the physic of man, the British for the first time are thinking of what was once unthinkable: abandoning Ulster to its anger. There is a growing cry in London to bring home the troops and end the financial drain of about $ 1 billion a year. "If there is one thing I have learned, it is that the English cannot run Ireland." So said Roy Jenkins, now Britain's Home Secretary, in 1969--and he could well say it again. The trouble, as the past few weeks have tragically demonstrated, is that the Irish cannot run Ireland either.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.