The Women and the Gunmen

EVERY bit as fierce-minded as their men, women have historically played a distinctive role in the troubles of Ireland. From the near legendary Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth), who was one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, to the black-bereted Provisional I.R.A. women of today, they have preached belligerence, run guns, helped plant bombs and provided sanctuary. The Catholic women of Belfast and Londonderry have been a not-so-secret weapon of the I.R.A.--lookouts who raised a racket by banging garbage-can lids when British soldiers approached, or shielded fugitive gunmen when squads of troops swooped into the Catholic ghettos.

In no small way, the fate of Northern Ireland last week hung on the consensus of its Catholic communities--and of its women. Britain had designed its policy of direct rule and selective release of interned suspects in large part to mollify the Catholic minority and dry up support for the I.R.A. gunmen. One indication that the policy was working was an excited and worried Provo reaction to the women's first public bid for peace.

Militant Fervor. On Maundy Thursday, Mrs. Martha Crawford, 39, mother of ten, was killed in a crossfire between snipers and British troops. In response, Andersonstown members of Belfast's nonsectarian Women Together--launched 18 months ago to combat violence--drew about 200 neighbors to a Catholic school hall last week to urge an end to the bombings and shootings.

Another 100 women sympathizers of the I.R.A. invaded the meeting with cries of "Traitors!" Said Mrs. Marie Drumm: "We are threatening nobody. But I would not advise anyone to hand over to the British army any boy who was on the run." The fervor of Ulster's more militant Catholic women was also reflected in several columns of paid ads in Belfast's Irish News urging resistance by the hunger-striking detainees aboard the prison ship Maidstone in Belfast harbor (which the government ordered closed last week). Said one sample ad: "Hamill--to Frankie and comrades on your ninth day of hunger strike. They can intern the revolutionaries, but they can't intern the revolution. God bless you. From your mother-in-law and family."

Nonetheless, for the first time in several months, the I.R.A. had to justify itself to Northern Ireland's Catholics. Sean MacStiofain, leader of the militant Provisionals in Dublin, slipped over the border to an I.R.A. meeting in Londonderry's Bogside and declared: "I hope to God that nationally minded women in the North will stand behind their men who are carrying on the fight."

But the momentum was gaining on the other side. William Cardinal Conway, Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, said in a radio broadcast that he would like to ask MacStiofain, "What right have you to say, against the manifest feeling of the Irish people as a whole, that this [violence] should go on?" Londonderry M.P. John Hume, a leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, judged that "a solution can be negotiated now without shedding another drop of Irish blood." Derry units of the I.R.A. felt compelled to call a "Tell-the-People" meeting to explain their policies to the residents of barricaded Bogside and Creggan.

The pressure was beginning to tell, and Ulster was relatively calmer last week--though only by the violent standards of recent months. One soldier was shot to death on the edge of Belfast's Ballymurphy district. British troops dropped from helicopters and fought an inconclusive, hour-long battle with I.R.A. gunmen hidden in a hedgerow near Londonderry. Not a day passed without at least one bomb explosion. Belfast had three last Wednesday. Later in the week a garage that might have been a clandestine bomb factory blew up, killing three persons. Another bomb blew out doors and windows in Belfast's luxurious Europa Hotel. But there was a marked drop in civilian casualties, partly because of a province-wide parking ban--decreed by the Stormont government before it resigned--which countered the I.R.A.'s murderous tactic of leaving gelignite-laden cars in shopping areas.

British Price. On the Protestant side, rampaging gangs of youths set fire to a Catholic school; the extremist Ulster Vanguard also pushed ahead with plans for a rent strike and a campaign to deface Irish money, which circulates freely in Ulster. But tougher tactics seemed unlikely. Belfast's shipyard managers bluntly told the workers that they would stand for no more political strikes--the yards are financially too indebted to the British government. From London, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, pointedly reminded Ulster-men that "there is a price for being British, and that is loyalty to the British Parliament." Subsidies to Northern Ireland, he noted, cost Britain $390 million a year.

Britain's proconsul in Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, meanwhile set up shop in Stormont Castle. He released a first batch of 47 of the 728 men interned without trial, plus another 26 who had been held for investigation. That drew a brisk response from Belfast's Protestant women, who sent a delegation to Stormont to protest the release.

But if Britain last week seemed to be gaining a psychological edge over the violent men of Ulster, all sides were sharply reminded of how easily the balance could tip the other way. Reporting on the 1969 communal battles that set off Northern Ireland's wave of violence, a judicial commission headed by High Court Judge Sir Leslie Scarman found no organized conspiracy, but rather a series of errors on each side that were cumulatively deadly in effect. "Catholics and Protestants," said the commission, "were haunted by the same ghosts, and retreated in fear to their respective ghettos while attributing to each other the responsibility for the blame." All too easily, that could happen again.

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