Seemingly Endless, 20-Year Ulster Conflict : ‘Troubles’ Go On: Irish Family Homeless

In borrowed slippers, with a sweater over her nightgown, Bi Hayes stared at the burned wreckage that hours before had been her home.

She had lived for 47 years in the small Protestant enclave in a Roman Catholic area of north Belfast, and early Thursday morning, St. Patrick’s Day, it nearly cost her and her family their lives.

Catholic youths, apparently angered by Wednesday’s attack with grenades and gunfire on an Irish Republican Army funeral in which three persons were killed and 68 were injured, threw a Molotov cocktail into the Hayes home.

The dramatic funeral attack caught the attention of much of the world, but it is the more routine incidents, like the firebombing of the Hayes home, that sets the rhythm of Northern Ireland’s largely undramatic but seemingly endless conflict.

The violence between Protestants and Catholics, now in its 20th year, has taken more than 2,600 lives, and it has warped the thinking of a generation that has come to accept sectarian killing as an unpleasant but inevitable part of life.

Elsewhere, statesmen struggle with possible solutions to their conflicts; here the goal is more modest. The British and Irish governments talk of measures to reduce, not end, the bombings and assassinations and intimidation that corrode life in the province of Northern Ireland, which is also known as Ulster.

Hayes believes her house was chosen at random, simply because it was near the entrance to the enclave and thus an easy target. Rocks had come through her window before, but there had never anything more serious.

“It’s a vicious circle that never ends,” she said as she looked at the charred ruins of her home. “Some poor Catholic will now get it done to her, just because she’s Catholic.”

Sense of Futility

A few miles away, in a Catholic neighborhood, a woman named Mary echoed this sense of futility as she waited in front of her house for the coffin of a recent victim of the violence to pass by.

“It’s been going on since I was a child,” she said, “and it’s not going to stop now.”

Indeed, Protestants and Catholics have been fighting in Northern Ireland, off and on, for much of the past 400 years. And on Thursday the violence continued.

The funeral of a 33-year-old IRA member, Kevin McCracken, took place without incident at the cemetery where Wednesday’s attack occurred, but violence broke out elsewhere. In Belfast, youths hijacked cars and set them on fire; nine policemen were injured and six people were arrested after a St. Patrick’s Day parade near Ballymena.

Roughly 1,000 mourners were present for the graveside services for McCracken, an IRA member killed earlier in the week in Belfast by a British army patrol.

A funeral orator, his words partially drowned out by a British army helicopter hovering overhead, condemned centuries of British rule in Ireland. Like many of Northern Ireland’s minority Catholics, he urged unity with the Republic of Ireland.

Northern Ireland’s 900,000 Protestants--60% of the province’s population--vehemently reject the idea of unity with the republic. They wage a campaign of violence against Catholics who advocate it.

Foreigners who ask about solutions to the conflict are usually rewarded with blank stares by Irishmen unable to grasp the concept. They see no solution. They regard the violence as part of their lives, and most of them try to minimize its importance.

Only the most committed radicals here talk of a sectarian war. Most dismiss the violence as “the Troubles,” much as one might refer to some minor inconvenience.

An unsightly concrete-and-steel wall, 20 feet high, separates Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods in West Belfast, and it has been given the ultimate misnomer: the Peace Line.

Hijacking cars and setting them afire, then stoning security forces trying to deal with the hijackers, is customarily described by the locals as “just a wee bit of rioting.”

This week, as Catholic youths hijacked cars, buses and trucks in West Belfast, then turned them into blazing roadblocks, motorists nonchalantly drove onto sidewalks to get around the burning wrecks.

Some of the province’s people get upset when visitors suggest that conditions are other than normal. They insist that except for the fortress-like police stations, the military checkpoints, the intimidation and the occasional violence, life here is much as it is elsewhere.

In 1985, Britain and the Irish Republic signed an agreement aimed at reducing tension in the province. This raised hopes that conditions would improve. But so far there has been no change in the level of violence.

Last year there were 93 sectarian killings, up from 54 the year before, the year the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed. Recent events, including Wednesday’s attack at the cemetery, will almost certainly lead to more violence.

Hayes’ husband, Johnny, said he was not sure about his future after losing his home.

“I’d love to live somewhere quiet,” he said.