Three Voices of Protest

Brian Faulkner is Northern Ireland's shrewdest politician. The Rev. Ian Paisley is its most charismatic figure. William Craig may prove to be its most dangerous man. Whether Britain can peacefully rule the province, reports TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast, depends largely on the responses of these three contenders for Ulster's Protestant leadership.

> Faulkner, 51, "a clever wee man," as even his Catholic enemies concede, is the Richard Nixon of Northern Ireland politics: he has both Nixon's reputation for trickiness and Nixon's ability to recover from defeat. Faulkner was twice beaten for the premiership before he finally won it just a year ago; even now, amid the wreckage of the Stormont government, his standing with the Protestant rank and file is high. He is a pure Ulsterman, a Presbyterian, the son of a shirt-factory owner, and he went to college not in England but in County Dublin. "I'm an Irishman," he once proudly said. "With British links. But I'm Irish."

Faulkner, who in pugnacious moments looks rather like a bull terrier, made an early reputation in Unionist politics as a right-winger, a staunch Orangeman and a fierce critic of the Roman Catholic Church. He was a strong and capable Home Affairs Minister, in charge of security, at the height of the I.R.A.'s 1956-62 border campaign against Northern Ireland. As Prime Minister, he offered Catholic M.P.s a larger share of parliamentary power, and named the first Catholic minister to a Unionist government in the province's history.

His style was always that of a political juggler, matching small gestures to moderate Catholic opinion with major concessions to Protestant hardliners. He introduced internment last August over the misgivings of the Conservative government in London. Within seven months, that blunder forced Britain to step in and take over Ulster's security. But Faulkner's decision to resign rather than accede to British demands reinforced his hold, for the time being at least, on Unionist party politics.

> Paisley, 46, became a member of the British Parliament 22 months ago. Since then he has transformed his image from that of a sectarian rabble-rouser to what many of his colleagues in Commons consider the authentic voice of Ulster. His warnings last week to Protestant extremists-- -- "Anarchy cannot be answered by more anarchy" won him widespread applause.

Son of a dissident Baptist preacher and moderator of Ulster's Free Presbyterian Church, "Big Ian" is unques tionably Ulsler's most compelling orator. He has made a career out of anti-Catholicism, but his former wise cracks at the expense of "Old Red Socks," as he used to call the Pope, have been toned down. On the first day of internment, he denounced the new policy and declared it would not work. Last week Paisley took a characteristically independent stand by advocating "total integration into Great Britain."

>Craig, 47, is a mild-mannered country lawyer who is fanatical about one subject only: the survival of Ulster's British heritage and its attachment to the British Crown. In 1968, he was the provincial Home Affairs Minister who made the mistake of trying to club civil rights marchers into submission.

He has long advocated the return of the notorious B-Special police auxiliaries, and today, as leader of the Ulster Vanguard, he talks of "liquidating" Ulster's enemies --meaning the I.R.A. Craig's oratorical style is wooden, but his words are often forceful, as demonstrated by the success of the strike he helped organize last week; his power lies in the visceral forces of hate he can unleash. "There are still some chances of averting a Protestant-Catholic war," he says ominously, "but they are very slim."

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