Culture : The Gun Squads of Belfast Put ‘Order’ Above the Law : ‘Antisocial behavior’ is dealt with harshly on both sides of the religious divide in the troubled British province.

Like so many wild-eyed young men of Catholic west Belfast, Seamus Clark liked to drink hard and speed recklessly about town in stolen cars. Worse, his friends and family say, was the fact that “Shamy” had a proud mouth around the wrong people.

That combination made Clark a prime candidate for punishment--not by Northern Ireland’s police and legal system, but at the Byzantine hands of local Irish Republican Army gun squads.

In December, 1987, a month after neighborhood vigilantes pulled him from a stolen car and beat him unconscious, five masked IRA men came knocking on his door. They ordered his parents and siblings upstairs, turned up the volume on the television, pinned him to the floor and fired five bullets into his knees and ankles.

Last April the faceless men returned, clubbed Clark severely with bats in the kitchen and gave him 48 hours to get out of Belfast. Today, 22-year-old Clark is hiding out in a small town south of the city and faces amputation of his failing right leg.

Clark’s story, which is not unusual, illustrates the quip popular in west Belfast circles that “there’s no law, but there’s order.”

In a bizarre outgrowth of Northern Ireland’s two decades of civil unrest, paramilitary gun squads throughout the province have shot more than 1,500 people and in other ways assaulted at least another 350 as punishment for “antisocial behavior”--the local umbrella term for car stealing, shoplifting, drug trafficking, rape, prostitution and a range of other crimes.

Such trial-by-gun-squad is not confined to IRA-dominated Roman Catholic neighborhoods. Police spokesmen say that local “hoods,” as well as political opponents, are regularly dealt with on the Protestant, working-class side of town by members of the Ulster Defense Assn., Ulster Volunteer Force, Red Hand Commandos and other loyalist gangs.

But the IRA’s prominent role in punishment shootings was singled out for criticism last month by Peter Brooke, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland. He said British security forces wanted to get the IRA “off the backs of the people.”

“There is no trial, no legal process,” he said. “Instead there is the knock on the door at night, the cold fear of the victim and the weeks and months in the hospital. Or the final and enforced departure from home and family ties into exile . . . or the hood, the bullet in the back of the head and the sad funeral.”

The province’s official police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, has recorded more than 100 punishment shootings so far this year, plus another 65 punishment beatings. This form of punishment can involve the use of “hurley bats,” used in Gaelic hockey, or “breeze blocking,” in which a cinder block is dropped onto a person’s legs until they are heard to break. Punishment shootings vary in intensity--first-time offenders often being shot once or twice through the fleshy thigh, while others get a “six-pack” of bullets through the elbows, knees and ankles.

Compared to the carnage of a typical American city, the numbers of such shootings may seem relatively minor. But in Northern Ireland, with a total population of 1.58 million, the numbers are significant. Nearly everyone in the insular world of west Belfast knows someone--often several people--who have been “done by the Rah” (slang for IRA).

Sinn Fein, the IRA’s legal political wing that commands majority support within the high-unemployment Catholic ghettos, maintains that such “kneecapping” and other punishments serve as a useful and locally accepted deterrent.

“Punishment shootings and beatings are the end of a very long process, which begins essentially with complaints being made by concerned citizens,” said Richard MacAuley, a Sinn Fein spokesman, seated inside one of the party’s six public advice centers. “There’s an expectation, in the absence of confidence in the police force, that republicans will fill the gap.”

He cited one highly publicized example recently, when a woman was gang-raped by seven men in the Divis Flats, a Catholic area of high-rises just west of downtown Belfast.

“About a hundred local women organized a picket to demand that something be done,” MacAuley said. “They didn’t go to the RUC (constabulary) barracks in the area. They came to this building to demand that the republican movement do something.”

The perpetrators fled the country before they could be shot, MacAuley said, noting that “if they come back to Belfast, one would expect very stern and harsh action to be taken against them.”

How IRA gunmen gradually gained their role as de facto police in many nationalist areas of Northern Ireland, and particularly in west Belfast, is a matter of debate. But it followed the Protestant-Catholic riots and introduction of British troops onto the streets in 1969.

Since then, the Royal Ulster Constabulary has remained more than 90% Protestant and has been viewed by many Catholics here as the enemy.

Police bases in west Belfast resemble modern-day Ft. Apaches, bolstered by corrugated iron walls behind which bristle surveillance cameras and listening equipment. When RUC members patrol the area, they do so in heavily armored Land Rovers, rarely leaving the relative protection of the vehicles at night. If on foot, they wear flak jackets and always are escorted by several heavily armed British army soldiers who guard against possible ambush.

Stopping “ordinary” crime in such hostile territory, police spokesmen concede, has been low on the constabulary’s list of priorities in comparison with rooting out the terrorist threat. To some extent, IRA leaders appear to have opportunistically filled a perceived vacuum in those communities.

A sampling of local opinion suggests that a majority of residents within republican areas condone, if not openly support, the IRA’s brand of frontier justice. One mother of three--a nurse at the local hospital--was blunt: “Kneecapping’s too good for those wee hoods,” she said, rocking her daughter in her arms.

However, a growing movement composed of victims of punishment shootings and their families is making a stand against the gunmen.

After her own 24-year-old son Paddy was kneecapped by local IRA men last July, Nancy Gracey founded Families Against Intimidation and Terror. The group is trying to protect would-be victims by getting them out of Belfast, or Northern Ireland if necessary, and bringing together kneecap victims and their families.

“We’ve a 21-year-old boy in our group who’s had nine bullets in him since he was 17 years of age. The IRA took a hacksaw to the arm of another wee fella,” Gracey said.

Community activists note that west Belfast teen-agers and young adults have been weaned on a violent culture in which authority figures encourage their participation in politically motivated crime, such as throwing bricks at army patrols and hijacking vehicles to make road barricades and car bombs.

“If kneecapping somebody worked, solved the problem, maybe I could understand,” said Carmel McCavana, a director of the west Belfast Parent Youth Support Group, which coordinates programs for “at risk” youth, many of whom already bear scars from IRA punishment attacks.

“OK, in the short term kneecapping put somebody in the hospital for a few weeks,” she said. “But in the long term, we know several young people who’ve gotten right behind the wheel of a lifted (stolen) car again, before their wounds have even healed.

“One young lad I know of actually was driving with his crutch on the accelerator!,” she said. “The young people here have very little fear . . . and very little hope. They need help.”

Help for a repeat criminal offender is hard to come by in this community, whose sense of siege traditionally is relieved through violent means.

Even Seamus Clark’s family has mixed feelings about the role of IRA strongmen in their neighborhood.

“The IRA shooting its own, to me, is wrong. But someone’s got to keep order,” said his mother, 62-year-old Alice Clark. “The kids run wild on the streets here.

“My son was doing something he shouldn’t have done. Everyone normally gets for their first offense one shot, no matter what they do. I’d have accepted that, so I would,” she said, sitting in the living room where her son had nearly bled to death. One of the bullets used in the first attack still sits on her mantle, flattened from ricocheting off the floor and into a sacred-heart ornament on the wall.

“But the Rah shot him five times. That,” she emphasized, “that wasn’t fair.”