Standoff Imperils Peace in N. Ireland

For Suzanne Duffy, 26 and mother to two small children, another anxious, sleepless night was about to begin Friday.

British army helicopters had thundered overhead all day. Near the street where she lives, Protestants have been massing by the thousands, determined to get in.

“I have never been so scared in my life as I have been these past nights,” Duffy, a petite homemaker, confided to a visitor over tea and shortbread. “I lay in bed last night thinking about it. I don’t see how we will be able to live here after this. I honestly don’t.”

Late Friday night, the tension and uncertainty continued as assembled Protestants fired skyrockets and aerial flares at police and soldiers, and security forces answered with volleys of plastic riot-control bullets.

For six days now, the working-class neighborhood of tidy two-story brick homes and carefully tended tea roses where Duffy and her husband, Paul, 29, a plasterer, and 4,000 other Roman Catholics reside has become the single most important tract of real estate in Northern Ireland.

Here, on the fringes of Portadown, where a factory town gives way to hilly fields and lush green pasture land, is where many say it will be determined whether there is to be peace in Northern Ireland.

“This is make or break,” said Michael Keown, 47, a ruddy-faced dyer in the local carpet mill, as he stood on the curving avenue that is the root of the problem, Garvaghy Road. “If the Orange Order force their way down this road, the peace agreement is finished--aye.”

With Scotland Yard reporting that it had trailed some Irish Republican Army dissenters and late Friday foiled a major terrorist bombing minutes before it was to occur in London, attention has remained fixed here on the Orangemen, Northern Ireland’s most influential Protestant organization, and their clamor since Sunday to be allowed to parade through the heart of the Catholic neighborhood 25 miles southwest of Belfast. This is a route they have taken since the beginning of the 19th century.

On Thursday night, when the ranks of would-be marchers, sympathizers and troublemakers outside Portadown swelled to more than 20,000, the largest number since the standoff began, a small group managed to breach the first of three defensive barbed-wire fences that British soldiers had thrown up. Members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary had to fire plastic rounds to repel the intruders.

Two nail bombs were thrown at police, injuring four officers. On Friday, British troops and police reinforced the wire and dug a deeper trench, and a pair of double-rotor Chinook helicopters ferried in dozens of soldiers in full riot gear in what was evidently meant to be a fearsome display of force.

But few Catholic townsfolk seemed reassured.

“This community is living literally in terror,” said Breandan MacCionnath, chief spokesman for the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition. “This community is surrounded, living under siege, and no one from the British or Irish governments is doing anything to lift the siege.”

In this neighborhood, where many members of the Catholic minority from throughout Northern Ireland found new homes during three decades of religion-based unrest in the province, residents say they now don’t dare pass through police and British army checkpoints to shop or go to work in Portadown’s center, for fear they will be waylaid or beaten up by roving gangs.

“We can’t go to shops, to Mass,” Paul Duffy said.

The lanky craftsman has not been to work since Tuesday, when a stranger showed up and asked the foreman of his crew remodeling houses if there were any Catholics on the job.

When this latest conflict began, Suzanne Duffy sent the older of her two children, Caira, 7, to live with her mother in another part of Portadown, because the girl is old enough to understand from the drumbeat of television and radio bulletins what is going on.

On Wednesday, Suzanne Duffy ventured out in the car with her son Ryan, 2, but was too frightened to attempt the return trip. She spent the night at her mother’s.

“For me, last night was the scariest,” she said Friday. “When you lie in your bed and hear bomb blasts, you’re paralyzed.”

On Friday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had refused the previous day to lift a ban on the Portadown march, offered to broker contacts between the Orange Order and Garvaghy Road residents, in meetings to be hosted by his chief of staff today.

Both sides accepted the offer, under which they will not meet face to face but will negotiate through intermediaries.

The shared willingness to talk provides a glimmer of hope that an end can be found to a standoff that threatens the groundbreaking peace agreement signed in Northern Ireland in April.

That fear was underscored when authorities tracking IRA splinter groups arrested three men with explosives and said they were “within minutes” of setting off blasts in London. Scotland Yard said it had rounded up seven other suspects in London and in Ireland.

While officials did not reveal an intended target, they said at least one suspect apparently had been posing as a student and was arrested in Central London near University College, part of London University. A woman was arrested later near Oxford Street, one of the capital’s busiest shopping districts; police picked up a fourth man and a woman about a mile from there, near the new British Library. Four other arrests were made in Ireland.

The head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, John Grieve, said the arrests were part of an investigation of “dissident criminal Irish republican terrorist groups.”

Police have warned that a real threat to the Northern Ireland peace accord comes from splinter groups that do not recognize cease-fires agreed to by the province’s major paramilitary groups.

As for Portadown, the protest there “is rapidly getting out of control,” Archbishop Robin Eames, primate of the Church of Ireland, an affiliate of the Anglican Church, warned Friday. The cleric said he feared that “nothing on Earth” could control the crowds now assembled on the fringes of Portadown, near the Protestant church of Drumcree.

Upping the ante, celebrations this weekend are to occur throughout Northern Ireland marking the military victory more than three centuries ago over England’s last Catholic king. The biggest parades for the anniversary of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne are to be Monday, and if the Portadown crisis remains unsolved, unrest could spread rapidly throughout the province.

On Garvaghy Road, where people are dubious about the resolve of the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary police force to defend them, these have been nerve-racking days and insomnia-plagued nights.

Last year, the Orangemen did march down the disputed road but not before truncheon-swinging police and soldiers cleared it of protesting Catholics in the wee hours of the morning. Irish Americans who were present accuse the British forces of needless brutality.

This year, “if [the Orangemen and their sympathizers] do get in here, there’s going to be a lot of trouble,” said John Devine, 34, an unemployed day laborer. “The people will just erupt.”

Shortly after noon Friday, the people of Garvaghy Road did receive some cheer--a convoy of more than 90 cars arrived carrying fresh bread, canned spaghetti, cherry soda, diapers and other assistance, an emergency effort mounted by Catholics elsewhere in the province to parry supply problems that have begun to affect neighborhood stores.

“This is to say, ‘We’re with you,’ ” said Mary Marr, a West Belfast teacher who made the trip with a carload of potatoes.

Organizers of the operation said the last four cars had their windshields and windows bashed in during an attack by club-wielding Protestants after the cars were stopped by police.

Suzanne Duffy was pessimistic about how it all will end.

“If the marchers get through, there will be violence,” she said. “If they don’t, we’ll face insults and trouble in town for the coming year. And next year, they’ll be back.

“All we want,” she added, “is the right not to have to hide in our houses like caged animals.”