Northern Ireland

By Alessandra Stanley

Every war has rules of engagement. Even the random bursts of street violence in Belfast follow a certain code. Chuckie, 11, explains how it works. When instructed to blockade a street, it is O.K. to steal public vans and buses but not private cars, because those, he says, "could belong to one of your own." The summer he turned ten, Chuckie came upon three teenagers in ski masks hijacking a plumber's van. He impulsively flung himself into the back of the truck; after the hijackers crashed the van and set it on fire, Chuckie helped pour gasoline on the wreck to make it burn faster. He was operating in strict accordance with I.R.A. guidelines, but his smile betrays his outrageous good fortune. "They let ya burn it."

Blessed with a sweetly impudent face, Chuckie looks like the kind of kid a homeroom teacher would put in charge of the class when she had to leave the room. But the I.R.A. is never far from his mind and suffuses nearly everything ! he does. Chuckie delivers the pro-I.R.A. Republican News on his paper route and twirls a baton at the head of an Irish Republican marching band. I.R.A. men in the neighborhood all know him. Chuckie comes from a long line of I.R.A. fighters, from his grandfather, who fought the British in the 1930s, to four of his five uncles. He is entrusted with small errands -- delivering a message, watching police and British army patrols in the neighborhood, watching the neighbors.

Lowering his voice, he admits he wants to join the I.R.A. Would he be willing to commit murder? "Kill Orangemen and Brits, aye," he says with relish. He pauses, then once again lowers his voice. "But I wouldn't kill one of my own." One of his I.R.A. uncles was killed by one of his own, shot through the head for acting as an informant. Chuckie is always mindful of that.

The I.R.A. claims it no longer uses children in the war against Britain, and in a sense that is true. The war in Northern Ireland has changed since the early 1970s, the days and nights of street fighting that any child could join. The bomb attacks and assassinations that the I.R.A. carries out require only a few specialists and a degree of secrecy that kids could only jeopardize.

When "the Troubles" flared anew in 1969, children who were under 16 and too young for the I.R.A. rushed to join the Na Fianna Eirann, a group created in the early 1900s as an Irish patriot's answer to Baden-Powell's John Bullish Boy Scouts. Members did a lot more than sing folk songs and hike; they fought, and the authorities made no distinction between Fianna and I.R.A. suspects. Fianna members had their own uniform, and the black shirts, berets and sunglasses gave even small children a scary paramilitary look. The youngsters became a macabre part of the pageantry in every I.R.A. funeral cortege.

The I.R.A. broke up the formal structure of the Fianna after the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and British intelligence forces had too often managed to squeeze information out of its members. The numbers of Fianna children who were killed, not just in riots or military operations, but in accidents as well, were also bad for public relations.

The I.R.A. still has a youth wing to instruct the sons and daughters of Republican families in Irish history, teach them the shadowy rules of urban guerrilla warfare and screen them for paramilitary service. John, 16, joined the youth wing when he was 13, and his early years mainly consisted of reading books, learning Gaelic and, to his frustration, painting posters and marching. "We've been protesting for 20 years against the Brits, and they've never taken any heed," he says. "They take heed of war."

John plays drums in a Republican band, the only legal way for kids in Belfast to flaunt their defiance. Like almost all Catholic ghetto kids, he's been in and out of trouble with the law since he was a child, but he has been extra careful since his last arrest two years ago. He wears his brown hair short, but not punk short, and he has no tattoos or earrings. He wears a blue Windbreaker and jeans. He is earnest, painstakingly sincere and a walking encyclopedia of the I.R.A. party line -- he has carefully shed any trace of the sly, irreverent wit common to his neighbors. John has been trained in firearms, explosives and withstanding police interrogation, and admits that he has assisted in a few "operations." He won't say a word about what or when or how.

Even in his pro-I.R.A. neighborhood, John is an exception. Most kids linger on the periphery of war, bystanders steeped in inherited hate, armed mainly with taunts and rocks, whipped into street violence when the I.R.A. feels the need. In Republican families, loyalty to the cause is instilled by grandparents, fathers, aunts; family scrapbooks are filled with snapshots of funerals and marches, and fading newspaper clippings of killings and arrests, not weddings and school recitals. But kids take to the streets primarily because it's "good crack" -- Irish slang for fun. To the kids, throwing stones and bottles is a game, an illegal act sanctioned by adults, and the best release from boredom. Six-year-olds will scoop up a stone and hurl it at a passing police van as smoothly as a beachcomber skips stones across the waves.

In the Belfast neighborhood of Ardoyne, a brick wall separates the Protestant and Catholic working-class neighborhoods, concealing the fact that the terraces of narrow houses are the same on each side. There is a small door in the wall, but the children never pass through it. Ciaran, 12, who was all swaggering belligerence around the British troops, mimicking an English upper- class accent to shout "Bloody buggers" as they passed, goes within 5 yds. of the door, then stops. He won't say why; he just knows that behind it lies danger.

In fact, there is nothing but stillness behind the wall. The streets are empty save for two Protestant boys, Robert, 13, and Frankie, 15, sitting on a stoop, doing nothing. Neither one has ever gone within 10 yds. of the wall. Even at 20 yds., the slightest sound from the other side prompts them to run like startled deer.

They are bored. Protestant neighborhoods are not patrolled by the British army or the RUC; there is little street life and to the residents, the enemy is an invisible force behind a wall. Robert, younger but more spirited, wants out of Belfast. He hopes to immigrate to Australia someday. Frankie is less of a schemer, more of a follower. His father is a member of the U.D.F., the Ulster Defense Force, one of the Protestant paramilitary groups. He doesn't know what he will do when he grows up, except perhaps end up like his father. "I dunno," he says listlessly, "maybe I'll join something."

There are Protestant paramilitary groups, and they have their own youth wings, but there is no occupying force to oppose. Kids in Protestant neighborhoods do not riot or throw stones. Attacks on Catholics have decreased over the years, and the assassinations are carried out by the men. "We've never been able to mobilize the young the way the Catholics have," explains U.D.F. leader Tommy Lyttle. "There never has been that same depth of feeling. Fighting against something is more attractive than defending it."

There are plenty of kids in Belfast who reject either option. Some of them opt for "joyriding," a relatively new plague, a widespread, nonpartisan and deadly display of juvenile delinquency that equally confounds parents, the paramilitaries and the police.

Joyriding in Belfast is a very different sport from American Graffiti-style cruising. Kids steal a car, then speed through the streets, too often crashing through police barricades or into oncoming cars. Because the cops tend to start shooting at the first glimpse of a careering stolen vehicle, joyriders will place a four- or five-year-old up against the back window to discourage the fire. Afterward they often strip the car and sell the parts. The joyriders grab cars from Catholic more than from Protestant neighborhoods, so the I.R.A. has taken to kneecapping those whom they capture. For every child who wants no part in civil war and wants to go to America, for every child who dreams of joining the I.R.A., there is a ghetto kid who has no dreams and who lives for the present, finding the instant, brief thrill of joyriding worth the risk. It's senseless, except that these kids have become inured to risk, and joyriding is the one violent activity in Belfast where the kid is in control, steering his own danger.

Joyriding has become an addiction among the hoods, as the hundreds of repeat offenders who have been arrested by cops or shot through the knees by I.R.A. gunmen attest. It's also a curious form of rebellion; to most hoods, both the "peelers" (the cops) and the "Provos" (Provisional I.R.A.) are hostile authority figures, equally loathed and feared.

Yet the hoods are always conscious of the rules. Simon, 15, a Roman Catholic and a car thief, passionately insists he hates the Provos, hates the cops, but he still knows what side of the civil war he is on. He was in the neighborhood of New Lodge the night of the biggest riot in Belfast last August, throwing rocks alongside the pro-I.R.A. teenagers he normally shuns. He makes a distinction between the thrill of joyriding and that of rioting. "Joyriding is for fun," he says earnestly. "Rioting is because you hate."

Barricading streets, burning cars and tossing petrol bombs are mostly summer events, when there are anniversaries to commemorate, school is out and nights are warm. It's a time when the air of Belfast is thin with the promise of excitement, and mothers pray for rain. "The lads don't go out and fight as much when it's raining," says Betty, 33. Four of her five brothers have done time, and her three sons are all adept at making petrol bombs. Even the six- year-old, whose forehead is blackened by a burn mark he got while making a petrol bomb, won't stay inside when a barricade goes up.

A hurricane could not have prevented the riot in New Lodge that took place that summer night. Aug. 8 was the 18th anniversary of internment -- the day the British carried out a mass roundup of suspects -- and it was marked with blazing bonfires in every Catholic neighborhood. For weeks, the kids had been preparing for it, collecting wood, tires, old furniture, anything not nailed down. That afternoon the children had also been gathering milk and beer bottles to make petrol bombs for "after." The police came by at 5 p.m. and smashed the bottles with their rifle butts, but the kids still had nearly 1,000 hidden away. "Enough to last the night," as one 17-year-old, a ski mask tucked in his back pocket, cheerfully put it.

At midnight neighbors stand around, talking, drinking beer, watching as the bonfire bursts into a wall of heat and forces the crowd against the houses. ! Older people step back with the aplomb of suburbanites watching Fourth of July fireworks, while children gallop through the sparks. The crowd screams with pleasure when flames shoot upward and set ablaze the Union Jack atop the heap.

As the fire subsides, so does the crowd. A few boys start throwing petrol bombs, forcing the police vans to rumble forward. Then the etiquette of the riot begins, as predictable as it is dreary. Teenagers turn back and hurl more petrol bombs, the police reply with rubber bullets, and the rioters hide in alleys and doorways. One or two smaller boys reappear, picking their way through the narrow cracks in the violence. Brendan, 12, delivers a report. "Peelers coming up Sheridan Street." When the bomb tossing and running resume, he vanishes. The younger boys keep the danger in mind. "Rioting is good crack," Brendan later says sarcastically, "as long as you don't get hurt."

Seamus Duffy, a 15-year-old boy from the nearby neighborhood of Oldpark, went to New Lodge that night looking for excitement. He never came back. Sometime around 1 a.m., he and a friend were walking down a street in New Lodge, headed for the epicenter of the riot. He was hit in the chest by a plastic bullet, crumpled to the ground, blood oozing from his mouth, and died before he reached the hospital.

Overnight a shrine rose at the place where he was killed, a lace-covered altar laden with plastic flowers in vases, Madonna and Christ icons, and a photograph of the boy. Above it a cardboard plaque read, S. DUFFY MURDERED BY RUC AUGUST 9TH, 1989. Along a wall near Duffy's house, someone wrote in giant white letters, 20 YEARS ON AND STILL MURDERING CHILDREN. His funeral, a nightmarishly slow procession, overflowed with grief.

To the cops, Seamus Duffy was a rioter who got what he was asking for. To his parents, he was an innocent bystander, gunned down by the heartless enemy. To the English public, he was all but invisible. The Sunday Times of London issued a happy postmortem on the anniversary, calling it "one of the most peaceful fortnights in the present troubles . . . only one British soldier was killed, as a result of an accidental discharge of his gun."

The afternoon after Duffy's funeral, three teenagers hijacked two postal vans, drove them to the spot where Duffy had died and set them afire. Liam, 13, one of the car thieves, watched the flames with quiet satisfaction. He was not in very good standing with "the lads," having been thrown out of his Republican band the previous year for joyriding. But this hijacking was approved, and this time Liam was working within the rules. "It's 'cause the wee one was killed," he said. Liam was back with his friends, and he was happy.