Waiting for the Explosion

"We've blown ourselves all the way back to the time of the Troubles, the period from 1912 to 1920. We're in a state of total flux. The sorcerer's apprentice started the water flowing, and now we are all going to be swept along with it." Hyperbolic as it sounded, that statement by one leading Ulster Protestant was a grimly accurate assessment of Northern Ireland's current situation. With the collapse of the moderate Protestant-Catholic coalition and the imposition once again of direct rule from London, the future of the province was bleaker than it has been in more than half a century.

Force-Feeding. The failure of the moderate experiment, indeed, had given moderation itself a bad name. Last week the militant Protestants, who had led the general strike that brought down the Provincial Executive were still exulting. Ulster's Catholics, meanwhile, were nursing their resentments. "It's awful," said Catholic Party Leader Gerry Fitt, describing the tension between the two groups. "The slightest thing might set it off."

The death of Michael Gaughan, 24, an Irish Republican Army member and Catholic Ulster's newest martyr, in an English prison could have proved the spark. Sentenced in 1971 to seven years for conspiring to rob a London bank for the I.R.A., Gaughan began a hunger strike March 30 as a show of solidarity with two other I.R.A. hunger strikers, Dolours and Marion Price (see box page 38). His weight had dropped from 160 Ibs. to 84 Ibs. The British government said that he died of pneumonia; Gaughan's family insisted that Michael died after prison doctors injured him fatally with a force-feeding tube.

For Ulster's Catholic minority, Gaughan became an instant martyr. His emaciated body, enclosed in a coffin of Irish wood, with a black beret (the insigne of the I.R.A.) on top, will lie in state this week in Irish sectors of London and Manchester, as well as in Dublin. Then his corpse will be buried in County Mayo. Gaughan's death, said Malachy Foots, a spokesman for the Provisional Shin Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing, "has been seen in Ireland in the same light as if it had been caused by a bullet from a British army rifle."

In addition to the Price sisters, three other imprisoned Ulster Catholics were on hunger strikes last week. The death of any of these potential martyrs could trigger a new wave of violence. Shortly before the sisters ended their fast, spokesmen for the I.R.A. were warning of "devastating consequences" and a "terrible revenge" unless the two women were transferred to an Ulster jail. British Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who had to make the decision, appeared genuinely tortured by his dilemma--whether to give in under pressure or let the women die. In a statement issued by the Home Office, he clearly hinted that if the sisters ended their hunger strike, he would move them to a prison in Northern Ireland in a few months. But Jenkins declared that he could not do it now, under intimidation, "however harrowing may be the consequences."

Responded one bitter Belfast Catholic: "The British say they will resist pressure and intimidation; yet it rings hollow when they will let these women die after giving in to a group of [Protestant] strikers the week before. The only lesson is how big your pressure is and how powerful your intimidation. The fate of two girls isn't enough." Ironically, even some militant Protestants asked that the Price sisters be sent back to Ulster to complete their sentences, showing that the two factions could agree on at least one issue of humanity.

Between British pride and Irish obstinacy there seemed, for a tune, to be little room for reason. The House of Commons, which had been in recess, was called back to debate the Irish problem; the desultory arguments in Westminster seemed only to acknowledge Britain's mood of hopelessness. The new Labor government is under growing public pressure to bring home Britain's 15,000-man army from Ulster and to end the subsidies to the province, which now amount to $1 billion a year. Politicians of both major parties, however, fear that if Britain leaves, the whole of Ireland will be drawn into civil war.

"There is no easy solution through the withdrawal of troops," said Prune Minister Harold Wilson, "unless this house is prepared to risk a holocaust." Such a conflagration might even spread across the Irish Sea to Britain itself, warned Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, whose inept handling of the Protestant strike helped to bring on the crisis. Rees presumably referred to the prospect that Irish immigrants in English and Scottish industrial cities might join in the battle.

The opposition Tory and Liberal parties agree with Britain's Labor government that some revival of a provincial coalition, with Protestants and Catholics sharing power, is the best solution for Northern Ireland. What seems reasonable and logical in Westminster, however, seems like errant fantasy in Ulster. The moderate Catholics who tried to govern with the Protestants, only to see their coalition knocked down by the Protestant general strike, have been discredited in their own community and are now being challenged to take up a tougher Republican line. Having failed so dramatically, the moderate solution will not soon be tried again.

There is, however, one other possibility: to let Ulstermen confront Ulstermen in a neutral arena, without British participation. Some support is being given to the convening of elected representatives of the various groups in a constituent assembly to fundamentally rethink the Northern Irish future.

"Let's take it from Westminster to Ulster," urged the Rev. Ian Paisley, a member of the Northern Ireland delegation at Westminster and a leader of the Protestant militants. "Let the people of Ulster be trusted and you might be surprised how a far better system of government might come out of this experience." Adds Rory O'Brady, president of the Provisional Sinn Fein: "Ultimately, as the farmer says, the cow has to be milked in the morning. We have to live together, when all is said and done. The British can go, but we have to stay here. People have got to be optimistic. My God, the consequences!"

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