"May God Avert His Eyes"

Reliving the past, often its worst chapters, seems to be a specialty of Northern Ireland. Six years ago this month, a company of British soldiers was rushed into Londonderry to put down bloody riots that raged out of control after Protestant Ulstermen had staged their traditional Apprentice Boys of Deny Parade; the occasion commemorates a group of young apprentices who, on Aug. 12, 1689, closed the city gates and prevented Londonderry's fall to the troops of the exiled Catholic King James II. During the 1969 march, taunts were traded with Catholics from the Bogside area that adjoins the parade route, and a pitched battle was soon under way, leaving 175 wounded. This year, on the same occasion and on the very same streetcorners, British soldiers were back in action. They fired plastic bullets and tear-gas grenades into a Catholic mob that had come to lob rocks and bottles at Protestant marchers, who, for the first time since 1969, had been allowed to follow the traditional parade route.

The Londonderry fracas was just one incident in an anniversary week that left eleven dead and 150 injured across Ulster. Among those killed was four-year-old Siobhan McCabe, felled by a sniper's bullet apparently intended for a British soldier. Another was Samuel Llewellyn, 29, a Protestant truck driver who was delivering a load of paperboard in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast to help patch up windows shattered in a bomb blast the previous day. Although Llewellyn was making the delivery at the request of a Catholic welfare organization, he was dragged from the truck by a Catholic mob, beaten and shot five times.

Last week, in an unprecedented gesture of atonement, hundreds of Catholics turned out for Llewellyn's funeral procession, and Father Aodh Bennett of the Clonard Monastery near Falls Road held prayer services for the soul of "our brother Samuel." Father Bennett said, however, that he would not reveal the names of the two Catholic thugs who he suspects led the mob in Llewellyn's slaughter. "They'll be punished by their own people," he said, "and when that happens, may God avert his eyes."

Indefinite Truce. By the end of last week, the six-year casualty totals in Ulster's long-running sectarian warfare between a Protestant majority (1,037,600) and a Catholic minority (474,900) stood at 1,290 dead and 12,807 injured. Since the militant Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army declared an indefinite "truce" last February, the casualties among British soldiers have been greatly reduced. Five members of the 13,000-man force have been killed since the cease-fire began, compared with 16 in the previous seven months. But the civilian killing has continued unabated, with 121 dead and 668 injured since February. Not all the violence has been between the warring religious camps. To enforce discipline within their ranks, paramilitary organizations of both sides have "kneecapped" some 90 men --shooting them through the knee or, in one recent ghastly episode, by subjecting them to a "Black & Decker drill job."

Despite the increasing bloodshed, leading Catholic and Protestant politicians began a new round of talks last week in preparation for the Constitutional Convention that is scheduled to reconvene on Sept. 9. Although they have spent several months skirting the difficult issues, convention delegates know they can no longer postpone dealing with the two main areas of disagreement: power sharing for the Catholics, who are virtually excluded from positions of responsibility in Ulster; and the "Irish dimension," a Catholic proposal for some formal cooperation between the governments of Belfast and Dublin.

Face-Saving Formula. Only last year politicians had literally spat in each other's faces. This time, perhaps because they realize that time may be running out, the atmosphere was better: Catholic Politician Paddy Devlin was even seen walking with his arm on the shoulder of Northern Ireland's most vociferous apostle of Protestant supremacy, the Rev. Ian Paisley. But atmosphere is one thing, and substance another. The Protestant Loyalists offered to let Catholics serve as chairmen of several key legislative committees, but they maintained that Catholics could not rightly lay claim to any Cabinet posts. The largely Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party (S.D.L.P.), meanwhile, insisted that it was willing to accept nothing less than representation at the Cabinet level. Having reached this impasse less than 90 minutes after the talks began, the delegates abruptly adjourned the meeting. Even if politicians can devise some artful, face-saving compromise formula in future meetings, the chances are that extremists on one side or the other will seek to sabotage it.

Thus, after six years, the British army is still caught in a couple of seemingly insoluble dilemmas. If it should pull out, the upshot would probably be all-out civil war. Yet the army's presence is a constant temptation to snipers and the resulting casualties may eventually create a "bring-the-boys-home" mood in England. Meanwhile, the "Loyalist" camp, uncertain of Britain's dedication to Northern Ireland, is already becoming a Protestant Irish independence movement--one capable of fielding an army of some 25,000 men. In effect, the British Army faces an impossible task. It is supposed to create the security in which a political solution can be pursued. Such security, however, cannot be attained as long as there is no political solution.

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