Ulster Protestants Seek Queen’s Help in Protest

Protestants on Friday renewed their campaign against the Anglo-Irish agreement that grants the Irish Republic a consultative role in governing this British province by launching a drive for signatures on a petition asking Queen Elizabeth II to intervene on their behalf.

Led by the Rev. Ian Paisley, Protestants lit dozens of bonfires across the province to begin a campaign for 250,000 signatures on the petition.

“We will launch our petition, we will exhaust the democratic process, and if (British Prime Minister Margaret) Thatcher still says no, then there will be mass civil disobedience,” said Paisley, a hard-line Protestant leader, after tossing a copy of the agreement into one of the bonfires.

Dublin’s Advisory Role

The Protestants see the Anglo-Irish accord, signed Nov. 15, 1985, as detrimental to their union with Britain. The agreement gives Dublin’s mainly Roman Catholic government an advisory role to safeguard the rights of the province’s 600,000 minority Catholics and attempts to undercut support for the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

On Friday, Paisley and other Protestant leaders gathered at Belfast City Hall and signed the petition asking the queen to approve a referendum on the province’s future. They sat at the same table from which, in 1912, a petition was launched against British plans to grant Ireland self-government.

The table was draped in the Union Jack, the British flag.

The British government has rejected Protestant pleas to suspend the agreement and has refused to allow a referendum, which would almost certainly go the Protestants’ way. Protestants outnumber Catholics 3 to 2 in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, the IRA, in its first claimed attack of the New Year, fired three homemade mortar shells from a truck converted into a makeshift launcher against the heavily fortified army and police post in the mostly Catholic village of Crossmaglen, less than a mile from the border with the Irish Republic.

Area Sealed Off

Soldiers sealed off the area, but 40 minutes later three more rounds were fired by delayed automatic timer from the van, which security forces did not immediately approach for fear of booby traps or sniper fire. Five of the six shells missed the base, but one caused extensive damage to the post’s kitchen. No injuries were reported.

In other violence, two gunmen opened fire on a 43-year-old member of the Ulster Defense Regiment and his mother as they waved goodby to visitors at their farm near the village of Markethill, 30 miles southwest of Belfast, police reported.

The man was hospitalized with head, leg and arm injuries, and his mother with leg and arm injuries. They were not identified.

2 Soldiers Hurt

In Londonderry, Catholics punched and kicked soldiers at a roadblock and tried to seize their weapons, police said. They said two soldiers were injured and one man was arrested.

Responsibility for the farmhouse shootings was claimed in an anonymous call to the British Broadcasting Corp. in Belfast on behalf of the Irish National Liberation Army, which split from the IRA in 1970.

Both groups frequently attack members of the Ulster Defense Regiment, a locally recruited and overwhelmingly Protestant militia.

Police say 2,525 people have died in politically motivated violence since 1969. The death toll in 1986 was 62.