Strife in North Continues After 15 Years, 2,400 Dead : Irish Memory Is Long and Unforgiving

A new shopping center is a big event for a town like Londonderry. It stands for sanity on streets where troops patrol with guns pointed at the townspeople.

But as the province’s environment minister, Chris Patten, was opening the glittering complex recently, a Protestant politician yelled: “Traitor!” The minister’s sin was to have allowed the city council a few months earlier to change its name from Londonderry Council to Derry Council.

What’s in a name? In Northern Ireland, everything: a birthmark, a battle cry, a hook on which to hang a national identity. To Protestants it is Londonderry. But to Roman Catholics it is forever Derry, its name before the British merchants and settlers came in the 17th Century to make Ulster a part of the empire.

While the debate was raging over Derry/Londonderry, a factory in South Armagh banned its workers from wearing paper poppies on their lapels in memory of the dead of World War I. The flowers, it was feared, might offend those Catholics who don’t think World War I was their war.

The Irish memory is long and unforgiving.

Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, the northeast corner of the Emerald Isle, is a land of haunting beauty torn between 1 million Protestants and 500,000 Catholics in a struggle that has taken more than 2,400 lives in 15 years. Some call it Europe’s last religious war. Others see it as Britain’s last colonial conflict.

To Protestants, Ulster is as much a part of Britain as Texas is of the United States. To Catholics, it is a piece of Ireland, ripped from the motherland in the crowning injustice of 800 years of foreign rule and misrule.

Their agony is inflamed by economic decline, which has left one in four Northern Irishmen unemployed, and by their remoteness from the hub of European power.

These are two tribes who feel betrayed--the Protestants by the British mainland, which they believe will always regard them as Irish rather than British, and the Catholics by the failure of the Irish republic to fight more vigorously for their cause.

The Irish government can do little. The republic with its 3.5 million people is no superpower. Despite a constitution that calls for the unification of Ireland, Dublin, beset by its own unemployment and recession, is not eager to compound its economic and security burden by shouldering a problem that is costing the British government more than $1 billion a year.

Some Catholics complain that they get less sympathy from Dublin than from Noraid, the Irish-American group in the United States whose last delegation to Belfast provoked a police onslaught in August that left one Catholic dead and several injured.

As for Britain, it is committed to obeying the will of the Protestant majority, fearful that if it wavers, the frightened Protestants will rebel as they have done before.

This posture has been stiffened by the Irish Republican Army’s attempt last October to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet by detonating a bomb in the hotel where they were staying for their party conference in the English coastal town of Brighton.

Left to Extremists

So the field is left open to the extremists--the Irish Republican Army fighting to drive Britain out of Ulster, and Protestant paramilitary groups like the Ulster Defense Assn., fighting against Catholic nationalism.

The religious labels are misleading. This is not a war about God, but about identity. The Protestant and Catholic churches in Northern Ireland have denounced the violence in the strongest terms. Pope John Paul II came to Ireland and pleaded on his knees for peace. The IRA ignored him.

The Irish conflict has raged since the 12th Century, when it was first invaded from the English mainland to prevent it becoming a base for aggression. In the 17th Century, settlers from England and Scotland arrived in Ulster, subjugating the backward Catholic population with a code of contemptuous discrimination that has not been forgotten.

In 1690 the Catholics rose up and were defeated by England’s King William. Even now you can tell a man is Protestant if his name is Billy.

The latest round of conflict began in 1969 after the Catholics began demanding equal rights, marching through the cities singing “We Shall Overcome.” Peace rallies degenerated into violent clashes with panicky Protestant communities. The British army arrived, and in 1972 paratroopers who thought they were walking into an ambush gunned down 13 innocent people on a Londonderry street.

That climactic slaughter locked the opposing communities into the battle lines that exist today.

Belfast bears the scars of innumerable bombings, street fights and army raids. Its working-class areas are crisscrossed with “peace walls,” sheet-metal barriers set up by the British army to protect the rival communities from each other.

The newspapers carry daily advertisements headlined THREATS, inviting people to phone the police and confide what they know about “threats, murders or explosions.”

Nothing but Conflict

A whole generation has grown up knowing nothing but conflict. Bombed-out buildings, walls of riot police and rows of fresh graves are familiar sights in Belfast.

And yet, Belfast people tell visitors in fall and winter, “You’ve come at a good time.”

First, it is not the Marching Season, the overheated Easter-August period when Protestants and Catholics remember their respective histories by parading provocatively through the streets.

Then there is the palpable shift in tactics by the IRA. Instead of the random bombings of the mid-1970s, there are signs of prosperity: new roads, a rejuvenated real estate market, a Belfast city center packed with shoppers. The security checks at the gates to the center, which used to turn shopping into an ordeal, are virtually non-existent.

Border Targets

The IRA, it is believed, now focuses primarily on targets on the border with Ireland, and on the British mainland, so as to give its political front, the Sinn Fein party, a better image in elections.

Bill Green, a 32-year-old Belfast Protestant who emigrated to Canada in 1981 and moved back this year, was at the Maze prison visiting a relative jailed for terrorist activities. He was glad to be back in Ireland.

“Yesterday I walked up the Falls Road (a Catholic area) and it was perfectly safe,” he says. “I even saw policemen patrolling there. It didn’t used to be like that.”

As a teen-ager, Bill had tattooed “1690” and “Ulster” on his arms, playing the symbols game like a good Ulster Protestant. A more mellow man now, he wished he could get them off, “But they leave these ugly marks.”

Londonderry, they say, is different. While Belfast has a Protestant majority, Londonderry 100 miles to the northwest is 60% Catholic. Here the civil rights movement began, and from Londonderry came the vanguard of a new generation of educated Catholics, inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King and singing “We Shall Overcome” as they marched for their rights.

They won many of those rights, but the cost was huge.

The city’s industry is dying. Unemployment is estimated at 30%. Police vans, heavily wire-meshed to fend off bombs, roar through the streets. The police can never be sure a call for help is not luring them into an ambush. Recently a bomb injured two British soldiers in a Catholic slum. The crowds cheered and blocked the ambulances.

“YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY,” said the large painted slogan at the entrance to one Catholic area. “WE SHALL NOT FORESAKE THE BLUE SKIES OF ULSTER FOR THE GRAY MISTS OF AN IRISH REPUBLIC,” proclaimed another in a Protestant area, where the sidewalks were painted in the colors of the British flag.

October’s issue of Police Beat, the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s magazine, reported 11 bombings in Northern Ireland, a mortar attack, a ferry robbery, a policeman shot at, three people beaten up with nail-studded hockey sticks, numerous fires and robberies of milkmen, post offices and pubs.

It added: “The fact that many of the public regard this last month as having been one of the quieter of recent times is a sad indictment of our complacent attitude.”

Northern Ireland is forever having elections--to the local assembly, the British Parliament, the European Parliament. Yet Ulster politics are stagnant.

British attempts to institute Protestant-Catholic power-sharing failed 10 years ago because the Protestants wouldn’t hear of it. So the Catholic parties refuse to take their seats in Ulster’s local assembly, regarding it as a Protestant-dominated sham with no real power since London has ruled Northern Ireland directly since 1973.

“In 50 years, the only piece of Catholic legislation ever passed was an act establishing a bird sanctuary,” says Eamonn Hanna, secretary-general of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, Ulster’s largest Catholic faction.

But as opinion polls, the elections point to a broad middle ground in Ulster. They show that only a minority supports the Rev. Ian Paisley’s militant Democratic Unionist Party or Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political front.

The SDLP’s Hanna is typical of Ulster’s new Catholic breed--highly educated, deeply committed to opposing the IRA, a 38-year-old veteran of the civil rights campaign with a bump on his skull from a policeman’s truncheon to prove it.

In the Irish Republic, Sinn Fein is even weaker, polling just 3% of the vote. The IRA is outlawed not only by Britain but by Ireland too, and more than 100 IRA guerrillas are in Irish jails. In September, the Irish navy seized one of the biggest IRA arms shipments ever, seven tons of munitions allegedly en route from the United States.

Irish officials believe Ulster’s violence stems from Catholic alienation. While conceding that many of the old forms of discrimination have been removed, they complain that the Royal Ulster Constabulary is 88% Protestant, that it abuses civil rights and sometimes shoots to kill when hunting IRA suspects.

British officials argue that only an improved economy can help, and that Protestants and Catholics suffer equally from the conflict.

Indeed, Catholics and Protestants sound equally vigorous in denouncing Britain’s anti-terrorism laws, which permit trial without jury, seven-day detention without charge, and conviction on the basis solely of a confession or the uncorroborated word of an informer.

Ulster’s middle ground of Catholics and Protestants could be found at the Belfast premiere of “Cal,” a film about a youngster who drives a getaway car for an IRA assassination squad, falls in love with the widow of the victim and ends up, in the words of the book that became the movie, “caught between the jaws of two opposing ideals trying to grind each other out of existence.”

The cinema was packed with Protestants and Catholics. Michael Open, the cinema director, wondered how the film would be received. In a society that hallows its causes, “Cal” is resolutely neutral. In a war whose victims are called “prods,” or “taigs,” or “uniforms”--anything but human beings --”Cal” forces its viewers, Catholic and Protestant alike, to look the monster in the eye.

When the film ended, the audience cheered.

Peace Bus Journey

The next day, the Peace Bus made its daily journey through Belfast, picking up families and driving them to the Maze prison. Run by the organization founded with the Nobel Peace Prize money awarded to two women who organized peace marches in the 1970s, the bus service is available to Catholics as well as Protestants.

The women chatted about the cost of living, showed each other cakes they had baked for their jailed husbands and sons. The children played quietly on the back seat. Religion and politics weren’t mentioned.