Plucky Belfast Cab Driver Defies the IRA and Pays a Brutal Price : Northern Ireland: ‘Provos’ shoot Catholic in both legs for refusing to surrender his taxi for a terrorist mission.

The young man in Damien McCartan’s taxi made his mission plain: The IRA needed the car. Now.

McCartan said he retorted, “You must be jokin’!” Then he told the hijacker, a lad he’d known since childhood, to get lost.

As armed Irish Republican Army men emerged from a nearby house, McCartan, 21, ran to a drinking club to fetch his big brother and some burly friends.

The IRA men found themselves outnumbered. They were unwilling to shoot into a gathering crowd in the Markets, a Roman Catholic neighborhood in south-central Belfast, so they surrendered the keys.

But that was not the end of it. Two days later, on March 29, they cornered McCartan in his taxi office, put three bullets into his legs and shot the place up. Then they burned his blue Ford Escort.

“Blood was pouring out my legs,” McCartan said in an interview. “They just laughed. I’d given these boys countless lifts in taxis to the pub. But this time . . . I’d publicly slapped the face of the IRA.”

His story, of a man brutally punished for simply defending his property, attracted the attention of Amnesty International. The human rights monitoring group issued a statement in April condemning “IRA practices of torturing, maiming and deliberately killing civilians.”

After years of criticizing the police, army and government in Northern Ireland, it was the first formal complaint by Amnesty International about abuses by the Irish Republican Army or its rival Protestant-based paramilitary groups.

IRA supporters contend Amnesty does not grasp the complexities of Northern Ireland, especially one feature of McCartan’s case: the hostilities between “old” and “new” wings of the IRA.

Jill Heini, one of three Amnesty International researchers covering Britain and Northern Ireland, said the organization believes it is wrong to shoot people--period.

“Our ultimate goal is that, by highlighting these abuses for the world to see, such violence will end,” she said.

On the night of McCartan’s defiance, he ran for help to the Lagan Social Club, a busy drinking spot identified with the “official” IRA.

The “officials,” commonly called “stickies,” gave up violence against British rule in 1972, but remain a force in the Markets and other Catholic areas of the province. They provide muscle for the socialist and avowedly nonviolent Workers Party.

The Provisional IRA arose in 1970 and has been the most active killer in Northern Ireland’s quarter-century of conflict. Sinn Fein, its political arm, and the Workers Party campaign against each other.

“Basically, one group of drunken thugs came out of their club to beat up another group of thugs who were trying to steal a man’s taxi,” said the Rev. Denis Faul, a Catholic priest and prominent campaigner for human rights.

“These two groups in the Markets have intimidated each other for years. They both beat up anyone they don’t like.”

Still, Faul said Amnesty was right to stick up for McCartan because “he’s an ordinary, innocent man trying to go about his day’s work.”

Paramilitaries of both sides use stolen vehicles, usually taken on their own turf. The Provisionals, or “provos,” get their cars and trucks from the Markets, next door to their bomb targets in downtown Belfast.

“McCartan did a runner. This hopelessly compromised the IRA operation,” said Sean Hayes, the Markets’ most prominent Sinn Fein activist since beating IRA-related criminal charges in 1984.

“He ran off into the arms of the ‘sticks.’ Then he came back with two men, known members of the Workers Party, who appeared to be armed and very drunk. Damien shouted at the volunteers: ‘I know who you are and I’m telling the peelers (police).’ ”

The provos also accused McCartan of stealing one of their guns.

“You have to nip these things in the bud,” Hayes said, explaining the provo view. “Otherwise, their own people could end up being killed and it would only encourage touts (police informers), and the IRA might have to kill the people who touted.”

Sally McCartan, Damien’s mother, will have none of that.

“Sean Hayes is a liar and a lot else besides,” she said, her face hard, “and Sinn Fein are the scum of the earth.

“When Damien told me what happened that night, I said: ‘You watch yourself with them boyos. They’re the lowest of the lowest.’ . . . They shot him down like a dog.”

Sally McCartan took her case to a popular Belfast radio program after news reports said her son had been “kneecapped”--a term that generally implies the victim was guilty of something.

She also joined a group called Families Against Intimidation and Terror, or FAIT, which was founded in 1990 by the mother of a kneecapped man and seeks to embarrass paramilitary groups through publicity.

FAIT put the McCartans in touch with Amnesty International, hoping it would act on a 1991 pledge to investigate abuses by “non-government agencies” in Northern Ireland.

“I think the publicity did damage the provos,” said FAIT spokesman Jeff Maxwell. “It certainly has made it difficult for Sinn Fein to go back straight-faced to Amnesty, who they’re always trying to use as a big stick to beat the British courts and security forces with.”

The Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein ridicule FAIT as a “stickie” front further tainted by financial help from the Community Relations Council, a British government agency.

“Amnesty must take on board the circumstances in which opposition groups like the IRA must operate,” said Richard McAuley, a senior Sinn Fein strategist and spokesman.

“The IRA has no prisons, no courts,” he said, then added: “We all agree that kneecapping people isn’t the best way to deal with antisocial behavior.”

Damien McCartan knows who shot him. And he knows that testifying against them could cost his life. So he waits.

“Every IRA man ends up killed or in prison, so I’ll have the last laugh,” he said.

“The way I figure, my case hurt the IRA more than it hurt me. And it hurt me terrible. I just can’t wait for the British army to shoot dead the ones who shot me.”