Cursed Be the Peacemakers

Over the past two months, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan have been trying to work a miracle in Northern Ireland. Sickened by the deaths of three children crushed by a wayward I.R.A. getaway car (TIME, Sept. 6), the two women raised a cry for peace that has brought 200,000 Roman Catholics and Protestants to demonstrations--together--to demand an end to seven years of sectarian bloodshed.

Last week in Turf Lodge, a Catholic ghetto of Belfast that is also a bastion of the Irish Republican Army, the women's peace movement suffered its first serious setback. Arriving to address a meeting in protest against the killing of a 13-year-old neighborhood boy by a British soldier's plastic bullet, Williams and Corrigan were shouted down, pummeled by an angry mob and driven to seek sanctuary in a nearby church. While the terrified women were comforted by a priest in the Holy Trinity sacristy, youths smashed their cars.

The attack was no accident. From the moment the two Catholic women began their peace marches--and particularly when they flew to the U.S. to appeal for an end to donations to the terrorists --Provisional I.R.A. spokesmen have denounced them as dupes of the British, "misguided" advocates who ignore police and army killings. Both have endured hecklers, obscene letters and death threats scrawled on walls. Then, just after the Turf Lodge meeting opened, word reached the already angry crowd that a British soldier had injured a pregnant woman with a plastic bullet. The eruption, Williams later conceded, was almost inevitable. She told TIME'S Ed Curran: "We had quite a good honeymoon period--better than I expected. Still, I suppose this had to happen."

Terrible Pressure. The two women had originally gone to Turf Lodge to condemn British army brutality. "I do not want any army on our streets," Williams told reporters after the mobbing. "These people in Turf Lodge have been under terrible pressure from the British army for the past three weeks." That explanation immediately shook the fragile alliance that Williams and Corrigan had formed with moderate Protestants. Further clarifications, in which the women affirmed their support of the army and Royal Ulster Constabulary as legitimate instruments of law, may cost their movement some Catholic support.

And the slaughter goes on. The death toll of 248 so far this year is already greater than during all of 1975. But the women's peace march is so hopeful a movement that a group of Norwegian newspapers has launched a campaign to raise $150,000 to give Williams and Corrigan a "people's peace prize" (the official Nobel committee decided last week not to award the peace prize this year). Said Williams: "The money would make one of my dreams come true. I would like to see a massive recreation center in Belfast. I feel our children have lost the art of playing, and I would love to give it back to them."

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