In the Shadow of the Gunmen

"The country is gone mad. Instead of

countin' their beads, now they're countin' bullets;

their Hail Marys and their paternosters are burstin' bombs --burstin'

bombs, an' the rattle of machine guns; petrol is their holy water;

their mass is a burnin' buildin'; their De Profundis is 'The Soldiers'

Song,' an' their creed is, 1 believe in the gun almighty, maker of

heaven and earth --an' it's all for the glory o' God an' the honor o'

Ireland."

--Sean O'Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman

THE shadow that fell across O'Casey's Dublin during the 1920s has become the specter that terrorizes contemporary Ulster. Sections of Londonderry and Belfast are as desolated as London during the blitz, and the scarred faces of empty, bombed-out buildings are pockmarked from gunfire. Streets are blockaded by ganglia-like stretches of barbed wire and by "antiterrorist ramps"--thick bands of bitumen or concrete nine inches high that force traffic to slow to a crawl. On the red brick walls surrounding vacant lots, the children of Belfast--perhaps the most tragic victims of the war--have scrawled afresh the old slogans of idealism and hatred: "Up the I.R.A." and "Informers Beware" in the Catholic sections, "No Popery Here" in the Protestant areas. If nothing else, the signs are additional proof of the old saying that Ireland is a land with too much religion and not enough Christianity.

The last week of 1971 was typical of life in the dour, grimy Victorian cities of the North that are a battleground in the conflict between the British army and the outlawed terrorist Irish Republican Army. There were bombings in Belfast, Londonderry, Enniskillen and the village of Rostrevor. where the I.R.A. destroyed the country house of Ivan Neill, Speaker of the Ulster House of Commons. (Neill and his wife were away.)

On New Year's Eve, Belfast was rocked by eight explosions. Gunmen fired on a police precinct house, while soldiers had to break up a riot between Catholic and Protestant youths. Earlier in the week, a sniper in Londonderry killed a patrolling soldier. The trooper, 20-year-old Richard Ham, was the 43rd British soldier killed during 1971, and the 206th person since the major riots of 1969. As if to emphasize the sense of despair that pervades the province, the

British command announced that children playing with toy guns run the risk of being shot. The reason for the statement was that children in Ulster these days sometimes carry real guns.

Along the grim, wind-whipped streets of wintry Belfast, there were also ironic, even humorous touches. On New Year's Eve, thanks to the terrorists, there were 30 fewer pubs than last year in which to celebrate the passing of 1971. To some, the prevalence of pub bombing made it seem as if the war were being fought by the Temperance League rather than the I.R.A.; it has secretly pleased some Presbyterian elders. Many customers, scared of the pub warfare, quit early. This has given rise to dour little jokes. The long-suffering wife of a drinking husband supposedly says: "That's the first time Paddy has been home before closing time in years." Another story--a true one--tells of fleeing bombers who had to return their stolen getaway car because they had unwittingly taken it from another I.R.A. man.

Black humor aside, there is no longer an easy or rational way to conclude the war in the foreseeable future. What began in 1968 as a nonviolent campaign for civil rights by Ulster's half-million Catholics--one-third of the North's population--has inexorably grown into an all-out campaign of terror by that most fabled and storied of guerrilla organizations, the Irish Republican Army. Best estimates are that the army in Northern Ireland numbers no more than 200 hard-core gunmen, and deaths and arrests have decimated its cadre of trained leaders. But the I.R.A. clearly has no shortage of potential recruits, and the recent history of Malaya, Cuba and Cyprus provides ample evidence that small guerrilla groups can survive for years against much larger military forces.

Terror, even when cloaked in idealism, is an ugly form of politics--the strategy of determined, desperate men. The I.R.A. is determined to survive and to win. Says Sean MacStiofain, chief of staff of the army's militant Provisional wing: "This is not just another glorious phase in Irish history. We must win. We can't afford to lose. We will keep the campaign going regardless of the cost to ourselves, regardless of the cost to anyone else."

Even if they were somehow neutralized by British troops, it is already clear that the gunmen have come surprisingly close to winning their political goals. Since its establishment in 1916, the I.R.A. has had but one aim: the creation of a united Ireland wholly free of British control. The army's tactics of terror have succeeded in reopening the issue of "the border," and the reunification of North and South--Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. They have made all but untenable the Protestant-dominated government of Northern Ireland at Stormont. They have caused England's Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath and his Cabinet to wonder if it is worth keeping Ulster after all, notwithstanding official avowals to do so. To many observers, in short, the real issue is not so much whether an Ulster tied to Britain can survive as how long it will last.

Ulster's troubles seem weirdly outdated in a modern world that, however mistakenly, likes to think of itself as rational. To understand the feuds of faith and blood, it is necessary to go back to the Middle Ages.

The root cause was England's historical lust to subjugate the Emerald Isle. Ironically, that ambition was sanctioned in 1155, when Pope Adrian IV gave sovereignty over Ireland to England's King Henry II. During the next centuries, the English made sporadic and mostly unsuccessful efforts to conquer the island. Hegemony was finally established during the Reformation, when Queen Elizabeth's army beat the last of Ulster's great Celtic earls, Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, at the battle of Kinsale in 1601. The vast lands of these Catholic noblemen were forfeited to English and Scottish "undertakers," who were pledged to "implant" them with farmers of Protestant faith and British race.

Hope flickered briefly for Ireland's Catholics in 1689, when deposed King James II of England, a convert to Rome, landed in Ireland to organize a war to reclaim his throne. On July 12, 1690, James was defeated in the Battle of the Boyne by his Protestant successor, William of Orange--the beloved "King Billy" of Ulster Unionists (those favoring union with Britain).

Fiery Words. By 1700, Irish Catholics owned only one-seventh of the land. The Penal Laws--enacted by a Protestant Parliament in Dublin --turned the warrior race into virtual slaves. Catholics were excluded from political life, forbidden to have their own schools and could not buy back land from Protestants, some of whom were sympathetic to their plight. In 1791, Wolfe Tone, a Dublin Protestant, formed a Society of United Irishmen, whose members swore "never to desist in our efforts until we have subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted our independence." His movement failed, and he died in its cause.

In 1800, the Act of Union abolished the Irish Parliament and made Ireland an integral province of the United Kingdom. During the 19th century, Irish nationalists fought the enforced union, mostly with the fiery words of such famed parliamentary orators as Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell.

The cause was also pushed along by the nationalist zeal of the romantic, rambunctious Fenians, who eventually fathered the I.R.A. Their principal organization was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was founded on St. Patrick's Day, 1858, to carry on Wolfe Tone's dream of independence. Vaguely socialist in doctrine, the Brotherhood specialized in random bombings and produced its share of patriotic heroes for Ireland to keen over. Among the most famous--although hardly the most successful--were "the Manchester Martyrs," Michael Larkin, William Allen and Michael O'Brien, who were hanged in Manchester in 1867 for shooting an English constable while they tried to rescue a fellow Fenian from a police van.

Evil Spirit. The British hounded the outlaw Fenians. Toward the end of the century, though, Home Rule for Ireland became a realistic possibility. Its most notable advocate was four-time Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. He tried to exorcise the "evil spirit" of Ireland from Westminster by disestablishing the Anglican Church there and by providing British-government funds for Catholic peasants to buy land from Protestant landlords. Yet in any discussion of autonomy for Ireland, the sticking point was always Ulster, whose Protestants feared the consequences of any kind of separation from England. In 1886, Gladstone's government was defeated on the Home Rule issue by the Tories, the most vocal of whom was Lord Randolph Churchill (Sir Winston's father), who coined a ringing slogan that ardent Orangemen still remember today: "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right."

A Home Rule bill was passed by Parliament in 1914, but implementation was put off until the end of World War I, partly to ward off the possibility of an uprising by the militant Ulster Volunteer Force founded in 1913 by Irish Protestants determined to fight home rule. The war, however, brought a new complication: the Easter Rebellion. In 1905, the Fenians had reorganized into a formal political party called the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone). Eight years later, some of its members helped form the rebel militia that eventually became known as the Irish Republican Army. On Easter Monday, 1916, the poet Padraic Pearse, one of the founding heroes of the I.R.A., stood in front of Dublin's General Post Office and read out a proclamation declaring Ireland a republic. The Easter Rebellion was easily crushed. The British executed 15 of its leaders, including Pearse; about 3,500 men and 79 women were placed under arrest.

The brutality of suppression made heroes and martyrs of the wild-eyed I.R.A. troopers in their makeshift gray-green uniforms and slouch hats. Many of them refused to lay down arms even after partition in 1921. This established the Irish Free State in the South, and in the North left six counties of Ulster predominantly Protestant (see map) as an integral part of the United Kingdom, with its own Parliament at Stormont. First the gunmen fought against the Black and Tans, the hated English force that policed the last vestige of British rule in the early '20s, an era immortalized in John Ford's classic film The Informer.

Stealth and Ambush. The exploits of those years of remembered glory were characterized by stealth, ambush, assassination and intimidation. Arms caches and the police were the main targets. On Jan. 21, 1919, gunmen raiding a cart of explosives killed two Royal Irish Constabulary guards, thereby causing the first British deaths since the Easter Rising. Gunmen began ambushing the constables from behind walls and ditches. In November 1919, a daring raid by the I.R.A. Cork Brigade cleaned out the arms from a British sloop in Bantry Bay. The Irish public tacitly supported the cause with boycotts of British goods.

The following year, as the attacks increased, the Tans retaliated. On Nov. 1, 1920, Kevin Barry, an 18-year-old medical student and I.R.A. volunteer, was hanged for his role in a Dublin raid. The Tans burned Catholic homes and even fired into a crowd at a football game, killing twelve and wounding 60. Nothing deterred the gunmen, who pulled off their most spectacular raid on May 25, 1921. The I.R.A.'s Dublin Brigade burned down the custom house, the seat of nine British administrative departments and the local government board.

New Life. Later, the gunmen fought against the newly organized Free State government, because it had accepted partition and taken an oath of allegiance to the crown. Even when Eamon de Valera, a commander of the Easter Rebellion, took over as Free State Prime Minister in 1932, the I.R.A. kept up the struggle. De Valera was ultimately forced to round up and intern many of his old comrades in arms.

Still the gunmen persisted, and during World War II they almost perished for so doing. I.R.A. diehards waged terrorist bombing campaigns against Britain during the war--sometimes with Nazi help. This so threatened Irish neutrality that De Valera turned on the I.R.A. mercilessly. He had three members shot; two more were hanged, while others languished for years in the dreaded Curragh internment camp. Proudly, Ireland's Minister of Justice announced in 1947 that the I.R.A. was dead.

In fact, it nearly was. When remnants of the army gathered at Bodenstown in 1949 for their annual ceremonies honoring Wolfe Tone, the Dublin Brigade, supposedly the strongest unit in Ireland, had barely 40 men on its roster. Political events of 1949 gave the I.R.A. a new life. In that year, the government in Dublin proclaimed the old Irish Free State a republic and took it out of the Commonwealth. Britain's Parliament promptly passed the Ireland Act, which has ever since been the mainstay of Protestant determination to maintain the ties with London. Under the act, Ulster remains a British province with its own Parliament, until Stormont chooses to unite the six counties with those of the South--which, of course, it defiantly chooses not to do.

Deprived Minority. The act strengthened the iron-fisted and arrogant rule of Ulster's Protestant majority. In many ways, Northern Ireland resembled a Southern U.S. state, like Mississippi or Alabama, where a minority--in Ireland's case, of Catholics rather than blacks--was systematically deprived of social and political justice. Catholics were herded into grimy urban ghettos like Londonderry's Bogside or Belfast's dank Falls Road. A graduation certificate from a Catholic school was usually enough to disqualify a man from a good job: in Ulster, Catholic unemployment is as much as twice the province's average. The persuasive power in Ulster was not so much the government as the Union of Orange Lodges (200,000 members). To celebrate King Billy's Day, Protestants wearing the Orange sash and bearing aloft portraits of William of Orange would parade through or near Catholic areas in an arrogant display of religious and political superiority.

The I.R.A. was less concerned with the repression of Catholics than with partition, but the resentments stirred up in 1949 gave it fresh hope. Under an austere new leader named Tony Magan who has since retired, the army between 1951 and 1954 carried out a series of spectacular arms raids--some in the North, some across the channel in England itself. Just before Christmas 1956, the I.R.A. struck against Ulster at 117 points along or near the border.

The campaign was a fiasco. The Catholics of Ulster were not then prepared to support the I.R.A.; the government of Ireland in the South was unwilling to tolerate a military invasion of British territory from its soil. By 1962, utterly humiliated, the I.R.A. called off the campaign.

The defeat led to a good deal of soul-searching and a severe ideological split. What became the smaller official wing of the army, led by Chief of Staff Cathal Goulding, argued that gunplay without political activism would lead to further defeats. This line led to increasing cooperation with Ireland's minuscule Communist Party and an eventual decision to form a "national liberation front." The so-called Provisionals of Sean MacStiofain insisted on military means first. Although most of the I.R.A. units opted for the Provos, the division between the rival groups was and is bitter. For a time, army units in Belfast spent as much time fighting each other as they did the British. A tenuous truce was worked out last March, even though the branches publish separate newspapers, support separate arms of the Sinn Fein, and have no common strategy councils.

The army has always had a phoenixlike ability to rise from the ashes of defeat, and 1968 gave it another lease on life. In that year, Ulster's Catholics, with the support of liberal Protestants, began their civil rights demonstrations for better homes, jobs and an equitable voice in the Stormont government. The protests turned into bloody riots. Mobs of Protestants marched through the Catholic ghettos of Londonderry and Belfast, burning and beating, while the Royal Ulster Constabulary and dreaded Protestant "B special" police auxiliary forces either participated or looked the other way. The riots and their aftermath brought Firebrand Reformer Bernadette Devlin to the fore as an eloquent spokesman for Catholic rights. The troubles also brought to Ulster brigades of British troops, who were at first welcomed as protectors by Catholics offering tea and sympathy.

Growing Violence. Under pressure from London, the Stormont government enacted some much-needed reforms--notably the disbanding of the B specials, and the allocation of housing on a merit basis. Gradually, though, the Catholics came to see the British military as enemy rather than friend. The reason was the growing influence of the I.R.A. At first it had merely policed Catholic areas, but in 1970 it began stepping up its preparations for guerrilla warfare. This led to sweeps of Catholic areas by British troops searching for arms--and inevitably to killings by both the I.R.A. and British troops. Last summer, as I.R.A. violence grew, Ulster's Prime Minister Brian Faulkner in desperation invoked the Special Powers Act, which suspended habeas corpus and allowed indefinite internment without trial of suspected subversives. Internment was intended only to quash the gunmen; instead it swiftly radicalized thousands of Ulster Catholics, whose support enabled the army to expand and intensify its campaign of selective terror.

For obvious reasons, the I.R.A. leaders will say nothing about the size or strength of the army or the sources of its income. Recruits are continually in training, some in secret camps near Dublin, but the British insist the quality and training of the new men do not match that of the veterans who have been captured, killed or forced out of combat for fear of arrest. Some Ulster policemen claim that the Provos have recruited men "who never would have been allowed into the old I.R.A. They're letting in criminals, drinkers, hooligans."

The army still has plenty of "gear" (guns and ammunition) and "stuff" (explosives), but the British are uncovering more and more arms caches every week because of breakdowns in I.R.A. secrecy. The discoveries indicate that the army has no regular source of supply: weapons range from the inaccurate Thompson submachine guns of Chicago gangster days to a few M-1 and Armalite rifles. "In general," says one British ordnance expert, "the I.R.A. scrapes around for any old thing that shoots." Army volunteers (privates) are paid little more than pocket money, and it seems that the I.R.A. has no shortage of funds. Ironically, some gunmen have been getting British unemployment pay of up to $35 a week. All the moneys raised by Irish organizations in the U.S.--perhaps as much as several hundred thousand dollars this year--is officially earmarked for civilian relief; the suspicion is that some of it finds its way into army coffers.

Stocking Masks. Currently, the I.R.A. campaign is concentrated on bombing activities, mainly in Belfast. Action in Londonderry flares up only when British troops invade the Catholic Bogside to make a snatch. The Belfast Provisionals include a couple of hundred volunteers in the bombing organization and perhaps a score or so of gunmen who may each fire only one shot per week. The backroom bomb makers rarely venture out, leaving the dirty work to carriers, most of them inexperienced teenagers. Six have died in bombing accidents this winter. The campaign is not yet a children's crusade, but the volunteers get younger; in one Belfast district the Provo chief is only 19.

A strange mixture of secrecy and foolhardy openness marks the I.R.A. operation. On missions, the gunmen are often disguised by stocking masks, and move nightly from house to house to avoid arrest. Yet in the North near the border, army chiefs practically commute from home and family to their outlawed work. In the South, escaped internees hold TV press conferences. While I.R.A. men still execute informers, there are telephone numbers to call for accurate information on whether Provos or Officials are claiming credit for an operation. The war is one of both violence and propaganda.

Risky Thing. Today even I.R.A. leaders concede that the army is "under pressure" in Belfast from the British. "It's getting to be a very risky thing to pick off a tommy," admits a leading Provisional. "In three minutes the area can be sealed off." Elsewhere in Ulster, the Provos claim--probably accurately--that they operate with little risk of discovery. Farmers regularly call on the I.R.A. for armed protection as they go out to fill in the craters in roads blown up by British explosives.

The army boasts that popular support for its methods and goals remains strong among the Northern Catholics. Austin Currie, an opposition M.P. in the Stormont Parliament, agrees: "Because of internment, there is more support for the violent men than ever before in my experience." Very little of that sympathy comes from the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which three decades ago threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who joined the army. In his Christmas message, for instance, Bishop William McFeely of Raphoe condemned "the callous men who are now prepared to plunge this whole county into anarchy and strife. We must be on our guard against the untold evil that unthinking words and actions could do to this country."

Just as in the fight for the Irish Free State, when the bishops favored British rule but the priests sympathized with the republicans, there are plenty of priests today who openly aid the army. "We condemn them and we confess them," as one Ulster priest puts it. Some of them have called upon the hierarchy to denounce both the British practice of interning suspected revolutionaries and the guerrillas' use of violence. One pro-army priest, Father Michael Connolly of Tipperary, flamboyantly asserts that the I.R.A. campaign is "not just a war, but a holy war against pagans and people who have no respect for human dignity."

Many British officials seem to be convinced that the I.R.A. holds power at least partly by fear. More objective observers suggest that the army's power is based on its quixotic appeal to the Irish imagination. It is an imagination fired by songs and poems about legendary deeds and martyred patriots, such as William Butler Yeats' poem of the Rising in Easter 1916:

I write it out in a verse--

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn.

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

The I.R.A., in fact, thrives as much on failures as successes: martyrs who are caught in the act are as useful to the cause as terrorists who get away. Unlike the abortive campaign of 1956-62, when many Ulster Catholics refused to aid or shelter the gunmen, the present guerrilla war has the overwhelming sympathy of Northern Ireland's Catholic minority. Thanks to the one-sided enforcement of the internment laws and the massive presence of the British troops, the Catholics are now almost wholly alienated from Stormont. The only question is whether it will be the I.R.A. or the nonviolent politicians of the Social and Democratic Labor Party opposition who will speak for them when negotiations for a settlement begin.

The Provos do not expect to win the war in conventional military terms. Their strategy is to make the crisis so costly that the British government will be forced into direct rule, thus bringing about a London-Dublin confrontation over Ulster. Army officials believe that terrorism has shocked the British into rethinking their attitudes and that this has brought unification nearer. If this is so, the gamble on the gun may well succeed.

The I.R.A. assault has done more than anything else in 50 years to turn British policy toward finding ways to end the haunting question of Britain's first colony. Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson has suggested a 15-point, 15-year program for unification that has been welcomed in principle by Prime Minister Heath's government. Even in Ulster, the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the Protestant militants, has declared that traditional Unionism is finished, and formed his own breakaway group, the Democratic Unionist Party, without ties to the Orange Order. Ulster Prime Minister Faulkner has intimated that Paisley has been talking with Provisional leaders, and that the army is now beginning to see the Paisleyites "as people with whom some sort of a deal might be done."

Stake in the Future. Fear of a Westminster "sellout" now dominates the Protestant community, despite assurances by Faulkner and Heath. MacStiofain contends that these fears are unjustified: "We have no interest in treating the Protestants harshly. We don't want them to leave the North. We want them to accept that they are Irish, that they have a stake in the future of this country."

Such words are small reassurance to dedicated Unionists like Billy Hull, chairman of the Loyalist Association of Workers (L.A.W.). Hull worries that Ulster may be abandoned by "perfidious Albion" and that Protestants may share the fate of those prewar "Czechoslovaks who woke up one morning and found themselves Germans." Says Hull: "If we're sold down the drain, there wouldn't be civil war. There would be armed rebellion against the government of Britain."

Thus unification could well lead to a bloody replay of the present situation, with Protestant guerrillas taking up arms for their liberties. Clearly, their rights would have to be ensured in a united, predominantly Catholic Ireland --although it is far from clear just how. The Provos, who tend to be rather cloudy in their thinking about the political future, favor a federation of Ireland's four ancient provinces (Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught), each with its own parliament and a measure of internal autonomy.

In the meantime, the I.R.A. appears capable of playing its cruel, destructive patriot game to the end. For better or worse, the words that Pearse spoke in 1915 over the grave of the Fenian patriot O'Donovan Rossa now reverberate across Ireland with every gunshot and bomb blast: "They think they have pacified Ireland . . . but the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."

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