Shifting Targets

Police are under new fire

Late one evening last week, Ulster Police Constable Ernest Johnston, 34, arrived home from his dangerous job patrolling the border with the Irish Republic. As he approached the garage of his isolated bungalow in County Fermanagh, two gunmen from the Irish Republican Army's Provisional wing opened fire at close range in the darkness. Johnston fell, mortally wounded, and the gunmen fled, presumably across the border only a few hundred yards away.

Earlier in the month, the I.R.A. claimed responsibility for two similar slayings in the border area. Wallace Allen, 49, a south Armagh milkman who was a reserve policeman in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.), and Ross Hearst, 56, a laborer, whom the I.R.A. had accused of passing information to security forces, were abducted and shot to death.

The three killings pointed to an ugly new shift in the enduring pattern of violence in Northern Ireland: the mostly Protestant Ulster police, or those suspected of affiliation with them, have become more prominent targets for the I.R.A. than the British troops. Since 1969, when the current wave of troubles began, 334 British soldiers have been killed, vs. 243 members of local police or militia. But lately the ratio has been changing: of 61 people to die violently so far this year, only seven were British army regulars, while 15 were locally recruited police or members of the Ulster Defense Regiment U.D.R.). One reason: the growing policy of "Ulsterization" of peace-keeping chores in Northern Ireland that is replacing British patrols in many areas with R.U.C. police or U.D.R. units.

Some British troops are actually leaving. This past summer a battalion of Grenadier Guards was transferred to West Germany. The British troops now number 12,000 in the six northern counties, the lowest number in a decade. More noticeably, they are moving out of some conspicuous, long-embattled urban positions, where relative calm has returned. This month a 100-strong company of Scots Guards pulled out of Glassmullin, a 240-sq.-yd. compound in the middle of west Belfast's once stormy Andersons-town suburb. Once the area was a cockpit of I.R.A. activity. Now, says a young Catholic resident, "life is much more peaceful."

Most of the remaining British forces are taking up new positions in the rolling, sparsely populated countryside along the Irish border, where the I.R.A. is still dangerous. Prove hit teams retreat to remote hiding places between ambush attacks or, lately, between raids on banks in the Irish Republic to fatten depleted coffers. Partly as a result of the bank raids, the Republic has built up its own surveillance of the border region. In early September Prime Minister Charles Haughey's government announced that Dublin will spend $240 million to deploy more helicopters and spotter aircraft, equip special detective teams with Israeli UZI submachine guns, use unmarked police cars and--shades of The Informer--pay more money for inside tipoffs.

Despite its increasing isolation from the Catholic populace that once welcomed its activities, the I.R.A. is still able to exploit one cause that wins sympathy even from those who do not condone its violent methods: the notorious H-blocks (the term comes from the cell-block configuration) of Ulster's Maze Prison. I.R.A. convicts in the H-blocks have long protested a 1976 ruling that reduced the status of new inmates from something akin to prisoners of war to that of ordinary criminals. The "dirty protesters," as they have been called, refuse to wash, wear blankets instead of inmates' garb and smear prison walls with excrement.

Ireland's Roman Catholic primate, Tomas Cardinal O'Fiaich, has met five times with British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Humphrey Atkins to discuss the issue, but the talks have made little if any progress. The British view concessions as a surrender to I.R.A. demands; the I.R.A. has reinforced that position by killing a score of off-duty prison guards. Yet until the H-block issue is resolved, the I.R.A. has a propaganda point as its terrorists persist in their increasingly lonely and ugly battle against both the British troops and the Ulster police.

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