A Massive Wedge

Ever since a militant faction of the Irish Republican Army stepped up its terrorism in Northern Ireland early this summer, a broad-scale Protestant backlash has been building in the British province. Earlier this month, 1,000 former B Specials, the Protestant police auxiliary disbanded on British orders two years ago, met to urge that the group be reorganized and rearmed. A few days later, 20,000 Belfast workers roared their approval of right-wing demands for a Protestant "third force."

Last week Ulster's Prime Minister Brian Faulkner moved to try to bring the backlash under control. First he persuaded the British to remove the 6,000-man limit on the Ulster Defense Regiment, a provincial militia. Then he announced that units of the reorganized regiment will be deployed to rural areas where Protestants have felt unprotected from I.R.A. raiders. The British army, in the meantime, decided to rearm part of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a predominantly Protestant police force whose arms were replaced with truncheons after the rioting two years ago.

Ulster's Protestant hard-liners were not appeased. Former Home Affairs Minister William Craig condemned the Prime Minister's moves as a "useless bluff, designed to prevent the restoration of an effective security force." Faulkner came under equally bitter criticism from Ulster's Catholics (who constitute about one-third of Northern Ireland's 1,500,000 population). He announced that 219 of the Catholics who were interned without trial last month would be held indefinitely, while a mere 14 would be released. "Detention," declared the independent Belfast Telegraph, "has driven a massive wedge between the two sections of the community."

Indeed it had. In a week of increasing violence, four more British soldiers and one policeman were killed by gunmen. Protestant youths hurled fire bombs into a bus carrying handicapped Catholic schoolchildren, three of whom were hospitalized with burns. Another crowd set fire to a Catholic school, and a Catholic mob exploded a bomb outside a Protestant youth club.

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