Without Mercy

NORTHERN IRELAND Without Mercy Death at a disco

The Razzmatazz disco in the small village of Ballykelly was no classy night spot. For about $2.50 a head, it offered British soldiers a rare chance to get together with local girls and escape the tense conditions of Northern Ireland. Gathering each week for dancing, the beer-drinking customers of the disco's Droppin Well bar and the gyrating couples on the dance floor took little account of the dangers of Ulster terrorism. Last week they paid the price. A small bomb, possibly smuggled into the disco in a handbag, exploded, collapsing the heavy concrete-slab roof on 150 revelers inside.

The Irish National Liberation Army (I.N.L.A.), a Marxist offshoot of the outlawed I.R.A. with allegedly close ties to Eastern Europe, claimed credit for the blast, one of the worst incidents in the province since the current bombing campaign was launched more than a decade ago.* The result was hardly creditworthy. "It was carnage," said one rescuer. "Mutilated bodies were lying everywhere." Said the wife of the local pharmacist: "Bodies were strewn all around, and injured survivors, some with ghastly wounds, staggered about in a state of shock." Others told of carrying out victims who had lost limbs, while doctors from Londonderry, 14 miles to the northeast, worked frantically to save the most mutilated. The grisly toll: eleven soldiers and five civilians dead and 70 people injured, some seriously.

The blast, part of a crescendo of new violence in Ulster, provoked a furious reaction. In Ulster's recently formed assembly, which is still being boycotted by Roman Catholic parties, the mood among Protestants was grim. "We want to see the men responsible for this evil deed exterminated," said one. "I don't care whether they are hanged by the neck, judicially executed or shot against the wall." Catholics were also outraged. "I rise not simply in anger but also sick to the stomach at this act of barbaric cruelty," said Oliver Napier, the Catholic leader of the moderate Alliance Party.

Nowhere was the outrage louder than in London. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told the House of Commons that "this slaughter of innocent people is the product of evil and depraved minds an act of callous and brutal men." Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Prior, who visited the scene, called it "a massacre without mercy ... [one of] the most cold-blooded acts of savagery [ever] carried out in Northern Ireland." Though the I.N.L.A. apparently receives little aid from North America, a conservative M.P. seized the occasion to denounce the "collection of funds for the I.R.A." in the U.S.

The bombing further increased British opposition to the planned visit to London this week by members of the Sinn Fein, Ireland's openly pro-I.R.A. political party, for talks on the future of Ulster. After the disco deaths, Thatcher denounced the visit and urged that it be canceled. But Ken Livingstone, the leftist leader of the Greater London Council (the local government of the capital) and would-be host of the Sinn Feiners, refused to withdraw his invitation. Home Secretary William Whitelaw finally banned the visit outright at the request of police, even though some security experts feared that the move could inspire fresh I.R.A. revenge attacks in England. Noted an angry Ulster Protestant: "The Sinn Fein are not allowed to walk the streets of London, but they can walk the streets of Belfast with impunity."

*The worst: in August 1979, on the same day Lord Mountbatten was murdered, 18 British soldiers died when a bomb exploded near their army truck, the largest number of troops lost in a single incident. In November 1974, 21 died and more than 100 were injured in Birmingham in several explosions, and in May 1974, 32 were killed in car bombs in two different cities.

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