Northern Ireland Forecast: Stormy Weather Ahead

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

Headed for a Sunday-afternoon game of Gaelic football near the border, Aidan McAnespie, 23, a Roman Catholic Ulsterman, passed through a security checkpoint just outside the town of Aughnacloy in Northern Ireland last week. Shots rang out from a tower manned by British soldiers and McAnspie crumpled to the ground, fatally wounded. The British army promptly took into custody the man who fired the gun, Grenadier Guardsman David Jonathan Holden, 18. Holden claimed he had accidentally set off his weapon and that McAnespie was killed by a ricocheting bullet.

In the Irish Republic, an irate Prime Minister Charles Haughey ordered an independent investigation of the case on Dublin's side of the border. Over recent weeks, the Republic has grown mistrustful of British judicial and security procedures. The situation was not helped by allegations that McAnespie, who had done low-level electioneering for Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican army, had regularly been harassed at the same checkpoint. Haughey's decision infuriated British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who declared that Dublin had no right to inquire into "matters north of the border."

The incident was the latest squall in an increasingly stormy relationship between London and Dublin. Like the weather over the Irish Sea, ties between the two countries can be subject to abrupt changes. The sun came out in 1985, when the Anglo-Irish accord was signed, in which Britain granted Ireland a voice in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Since then a series of controversial British decisions has drawn complaints from Ireland.

Irish anger began to surge in late January, when the Thatcher government announced that, for reasons of "national security," it would not prosecute a group of officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's predominantly Protestant police force. The officers were involved in the R.U.C.'s alleged shoot-to-kill policy of 1982 and 1983. An official inquiry on the case has gone unpublished.

In February, however, an explosive book called Stalker was published. It was written by now retired Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker of the Greater Manchester police force, who was placed in charge of the R.U.C. probe in 1984 but dismissed two years later. In his book, Stalker implies that he was ousted for implicating senior R.U.C. officers, that he found evidence of a "police inclination, if not policy, to shoot suspects dead without warning, rather than arrest them," and that at least eleven policemen were involved in a conspiracy to pervert justice.

Dublin was also shocked by a British appeals court's decision in late January to uphold the convictions of six men, all Catholics of Ulster origin, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for two terrorist bombings in Birmingham in 1974. The defendants had charged that their confessions were extracted under duress; in any case, new evidence had emerged casting doubt on their guilt. Dublin was dismayed again last week when Private Ian Thain, the ) only British soldier convicted of a murder committed during the course of duty in Northern Ireland, was paroled after serving less than 2 1/2 years of a life sentence and reinstated in his old regiment, the Light Infantry.

Haughey met with Thatcher in mid-February and demanded that the reports on the alleged R.U.C. shoot-to-kill policy be published and that the implicated officers be brought to trial. Four days later Tom King, Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, rejected Haughey's request. The London Times criticized as "simply wrong" both Thain's reinstatement and the decision not to prosecute the R.U.C. officers. The forecast: unless tempers cool in Dublin and London, more thunder.

With reporting by Brigid O''Hara-Forster/London