A Grim Scenario for Doomsday

Ulster's Protestant majority, dissatisfied with British government efforts to re-establish a system of power sharing with the Catholic minority, establishes its own autonomous provisional government in Belfast. The Catholics react with unparalleled fury, and the two sides join in open warfare. Disgusted with the unending civil strife and the continued $1 billion-a-year drain on its own anemic economy, Britain decides to call it quits in Northern Ireland and pulls out its 15,600 troops. Ulster Protestants, who outnumber the province's Catholics 2 to 1, quickly win the upper hand, forcing the intervention of the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland. The entire island erupts in civil war.

That doomsday scenario, first proposed in a semiprivate memo by Irish Diplomat-Politician Conor Cruise O'Brien last month, is now being taken seriously by responsible politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea. Five months after a Protestant general strike brought down the short-lived Executive--a provincial government that included Protestants and Catholics--the sides in Ulster are becoming increasingly and intractably polarized. Last month's British election gave Ulster's Protestant extremists an even bigger share of the province's vote than they had received in the February election (58%, v. 51%) and ten seats in Parliament.

Exhausted, exposed and internally divided, Catholic militants in Ulster reacted in a now familiar way--with violence. The Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army sponsored disturbances in four prisons to protest conditions and the fact that an estimated 500 I.R.A. suspects are being held without trial. Maze Prison near Belfast (formerly the infamous Long Kesh internment camp), which houses 1,400 prisoners, was 75% gutted; 100 female inmates at Armagh Prison seized the warden and three of his assistants and held them captive for 14 hours. Catholic sympathizers held demonstrations in Belfast, Londonderry, Newry, Armagh, Lurgan and Strabane.

Brazen Killing. In the past month Protestant militants have undertaken a new campaign of sectarian violence.

Several young Catholics, most of them in their late teens and 20s, have been gunned down. In one brazen killing last week, gunmen drove into the heart of Belfast's Catholic Lower Falls area during morning rush-hour traffic, made a U-turn 60 feet in front of a British army sentry post, then came back and shot down two construction workers on their way to their jobs. Eleven Catholics have been killed in the past month and another 26 wounded. In addition, three Protestants have been killed and 14 wounded, presumably by I.R.A. gunmen.

Protestant spokesmen insist that the violence would stop altogether if the I.R.A., which started the bloodshed in 1969, would declare a ceasefire. "People look at the killing as an act of war," says a member of the Ulster Defense Association, a Protestant paramilitary group. Another Protestant gun fighter agrees, "There's a lot of people in Northern Ireland who've lost their husbands, sisters and loved ones. Can you condemn these people for killing? An eye for an eye, trick for trick, tit for tat. I'd like to see this thing stop. But the Protestants have been forced into what they're doing. When you're forced into a corner, what do you do? They're killing our people. We're killing back."

British army officials seem to agree that the Protestants will stop if the Catholics do. Lately the British have been applying most of their weight against Ulster's Catholics. On the grounds that the I.R.A. is responsible for most of the terrorism, the army is making less and less of a pretense of being evenhanded in its treatment of the two sides. Army officials are adamantly opposed to heeding civilian calls for ending their power to detain suspects without trial, the practice that led to the prison riots. Of 387 detainees who have been released this year, the army estimates, 30% to 50% are already working again as I.R.A. terrorists.

While refusing to admit defeat, the I.R.A. concedes that it has been checked by the latest British crackdown. "We realize that a whole lot of rethinking must be done," one ranking I.R.A. leader told TIME Correspondent William McWhirter last week. "Some of the methods and tactics we've used are outdated. We've come to a stalemate against the British army. They can't defeat us and we can't defeat them. Many blows have been struck effectively against the army, but they are just a waste of time. You can sense the fears in the streets now. You can see how few people go out into the streets after dark, and when they do they talk in low whispers and look constantly over their shoulders."

No Answer. Except for the army's strong line, Britain seems uncertain about what it should do. London is no longer leading events in Northern Ireland, and it is only barely managing to respond to them. The Labor government hopes to hold an election in the province next year for a constituent assembly that might give Ulster a fresh political start. After their victory in the parliamentary election last month, Protestants would like to see the assembly set up quickly, confident that they would win most of the seats and would thereupon resume the power they held for 50 years, up to 1972. Catholics want the assembly put off indefinitely--to prevent exactly that outcome. The Dublin government is also urging London to go slowly, fearful that a return to Protestant dominance in the North would push Ulster past the point of no return.

Caught between both sides, the British seem to have no answer at all, except to go on as they are now. More and more, however, they are contemplating the simplest if most cataclysmic solution--total withdrawal. If the Irish cannot come to terms among themselves, says one high British official, "there will be a great uprising of British public opinion. They will say, 'That's the limit.' Even the best-willed people in Ireland do not realize the strength of opinion at home, which will not wear through another round of an intractable situation."

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