NO MORE SONGS

...they were quite prepared to return to violence if this new idea didn't work out...

...Even if this did lead to a drop in Catholic religious practice, now estimated at 90 percent with a sag among 18-25 year-olds--and it's not inevitable that it should--the resulting peace and mutual understanding among the young might be worth it...

...and the Irish Council of Churohes for about 35 American church leaders and journalists...

...Also on board were the boys, apparently ranging in ages from 12 to 30, of the Belfast Flute and Drum Band, also en-route, expenses paid, to beat their drums in Scotland in the Orangemen's parades...

...When I asked the urbane, apparently fair-minded Barry White, editorial writer for the Belfast Telegraph, what the press had found in following up these charges he replied that, to its shame, the press had no tradition of investigative reporting in Northern Ireland...

...One has recently come from a strange source...

...On our last night in Belfast, June 29, we met, in an atmosphere of tension and secrecy, with four leaders of the UDA, a Protestant private army claiming 15,000 active members with 810,000 reserves, on the top floor of the offices of the Irish Council of Churches...

...Although Northern Ireland's hunk of meat--its economic resources--is not enormous, at a time when the overall British economy, with its high prices and relatively low wages, is in poor shape, and although the psychological distance between Catholics, Protestants and British, who all have both exaggerated and well-founded feal:s of the others' intentions, is still great, a number of constructive compromises are possible...

...I must confess feeling a powerful aversion to these men and some doubts about the new appearance of legitimacy they may acquire through the ICC's tolerant ministration...

...He said only that the hoax bomb report had come from a "sick mind...

...Second, the Protestant churches should do more to undermine the influence of the 100,000-member Orange Order, and call for a moratorium on their parades--particularly the July 12 march with its drums and bonfires designed to humiliate Catholic neighbors--and break their monopoly on the better jobs...

...Then, in mid-June--in response, some said, to a political leader's statement that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was on its knees---the killings picked up...

...The policemen of the Royal Ulster Constabulary cleared us out of our rooms and the bar right before midnight and ordered everyone to remove his car from the lot...

...songs, shoot guns and plant bombs...

...Some examples: the IRA murdered--they say "executed" because he was a policeman--William Turbitt, although the extremist Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, had released their hostage, the popular priest, Rev...

...I also have an emotional fear that somewhere deep in the depressed Irish spirit there is a demon that doesn't want a rational solution, the demon of addiction to a romantic myth of a "united" all-Gaelic nation and culture, fed by bloodshed, self-immolation and hate--as if this "fratricidal slaughter" is destined to go on indefinitely, like a boozy, point-scoring political argument in a pub that will never close...

...Besides, he said, "everybody knows what's going on...

...On the boat from Ireland to Scotland I had a long talk with an Ulsterman, a former soldier, a proud Orangeman on his way to march in a parade...

...First, the Catholic Church, while sharpening its specific condemnations of all terrorism and emphasizing its concern for social justice and civil fights, should diminish its role as the dominant cultural force: specifically, it should be much more liberal in interpreting the norms for mixed marriages, to the point of actively encouraging them, and it should gradually phase its young people into a common integrated school System...

...Meanwhile in Belfast the warring factions are like wild animals circling a hunk of meat, ready to kill for it even though there would be enough for each if each were willing to eat a little less...

...Obviously public men are reluctant to deal with this plan because of its source...

...Now the UDA was presenting a new face: their years of killing, they said, had not brought the result~ they wanted...

...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH (Rev...

...One of our sessions had made the evening news, so a local terrorist wanted to give us visitors a mild taste of what they could do...

...Most likely the call came because we were there-for the Information Seminar sponsored by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A...

...And late Tuesday night someone phoned a bomb threat--a bomb in a parked car, it said--to our hotel, Commonweal: 485 the Stormont, a comfortable spot across the street from the magnificent top-of-the-hill palace from which Northern Ireland had governed itself until the British, convinced that the religious rioting between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority begun in 1968 was so far out of hand that Northern Ireland could no longer govern itself, seized direct control in 1972...

...This time there was no bomb...

...The authoritative Violence in Ireland: A Report to the Churches (1977), published by ICC and the Catholic hierarchy, concludes there is "no justification" for the killing and bombing campaigns and reminds church members of their moral responsibility to bring information of violent activities of paramilitary organizations before authorities...

...Third, the United States should get more involved...

...He said he had nothing against Catholics, although his three cousins, twe aunts and an uncle were shot in the back of the head by the IRA...

...they felt they had been used as pawns by the politicians...

...I thought of some of their counterparts from the Republic (some generations removed) now in the Irish bars around Fordham in the Bronx where they take up collections for Northern Ireland "relief," and where the young 'men sing mournful ballads about Irish soldier boys going off to kill a Brit...

...Its 150,000 readers are Unionists, not interested in criticism of the RUC...

...A more reasonable solution that might create the kind of self-confident society in which terrorism would wither, it seems to me, was put forward to us the day of the bomb scare by Denis Hanghey, chairman of the predominantly Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party, in a challenge to the Unionists to face the fact that, according tO current population trends, with the virtual halt of emigration, within a generation Northern Ireland will have a Catholic majority...

...IRA gunmen ambushed and killed Alan Ferguson, 22, of the Ulster Defense Regiment, and his Protestant bishop preached his eulogy--"The country must know that this young man was a truer Irishman than any of those who so treacherously led the ambush and took away his life...

...Now, after a week in Belfast talking with church and state leaders, journalists, social workers, British soldiers, policemen, members of the paramilitary, peace people and ordinary citizens, plus another week reading and listening in Scotland and England, I come home with a state of mind as ambivalent and paradoxical as Northern Ireland itself...

...He said he'd rather not, so they asked him to take the picture...

...the IRA shot Patrick McEntee, 58, the father of six children, in the head because, they said (wrongly, it seems) he was an "informer," and put booby traps around his body, and the new Catholic Primate of all-Ireland, the blunt scholar Tomas O'Fiaich, a nationalist with no love for the British presence, eulogized him--the killing was an act of "fratricidal slaughter" by a group of local tyrants who claimed "to set themselves up as judges and executioners of their fellow men...

...When he learned I was a priest he shook my hand and said he hoped I didn't mind the things he had said...

...I have a rational conviction that the basic problemma minor one compared to the Mideast, Cambodia or South Africa--can and must be resolved by an internationally-guaranteed political-economic formula...

...They say Paul O'Dwyer is with them 100 percent and that Senator George McGovern is sympathetic...

...an offer from the main parties in the National tradition--to include Northern state control over all internal matters, right of British citizenship and passport, a Bill of Rights guaranteeing an open society, a parliamentary system that would protect the rights and access of both communities to power...

...Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is associate editor o/Commonweal...

...It was early afternoon, but they had started putting away the pints before they even got on the train, and now they were very drunk and very loud and rather rowdy, stamping on the boat deck and singing "We're the boys from Londonderry . . ." I could sense the violence in these young men and could imagine their part in the bloodshed I had been reading and hearing about for ten years;-but when they played their flutes it was music of a sort and I was glad they were having a good time, that they weren't back in Belfast throwing rocks, and that they were getting out of the very small world of Northern Ireland--maybe even to get a new idea for a few days...

...he was 4 August 1978:486 sick and tired of being told what to do by politicians and church leaders who won't listen...

...Sean Cooney, a courageous, high-strung, physically exhausted community organizer in the ravaged Catholic neighborhood of the Ardoyne, summed up the frustration of people on both sides working for grass-roots solutions: government and institutional church resources were not being made available to the people...

...meanwhile security forces gunned down three young terrorists planting bombs---with a reported 200 rounds fired to do them in--an index of the passion with which they were punished...

...and an expos6 of the IRA or the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) would bring a knock at the door or a bomb through the office window...

...He was not bitter over the fact that in Northern Ireland a car could not be insured against this type of accident...

...They have been promoting their scheme selectively but vigorously at 'home and abroad with lukewarm reception...

...Besides offering its services to help guarantee an eventual political settlement, it should move now on President Jimmy Carter's promise to encourage more U.S...

...Not a chance...

...We know where our own readership is," he said...

...The .troops moved in on the lonely car with rifles and fired away, hoping to detonate the bomb if it was there...

...Unable to take it any more, Mackin would not confess but tried to cut ,his own wrists with a plastic knife...

...they have allegedly suspended killing since 1976, while their "study group," with outside professional academic advice, has drawn up a new American-style Constitution, with a bill of rights, for an Independent Northern Irelandnwith a Speaker of the House elected by two-thirds (to get consensus government) and an American Chief Justice of their Supreme Court (to assure impartiaiRy...

...We will know better this fall what kind of a chance this plan has...

...The British government officials, Unionist (Protestant) politicians, and RUC spokesmen blandly discounted the recent Amnesty International report and other charges of interrogation torture and maltreatment in prison, while the Association for Legal Justice produced scores of formal statements, made to solicitors and supported by doctors, by young men and women who had been brutalized within the last year...

...The Telegraph is part of Lord Thompson's chain...

...When their Supreme Commander, Andy Tyrie, a short, compact, thirtyish man with a black moustache, tinted glasses and platform shoes, repeated to me that his group had killed Catholics indiscriminately for years, I asked him why, if they were now seeking a constitutional solution, they did not lay down their weapons...

...One of the problems, of course, was getting the truth...

...A young wife, unknown to her husband, had parked the family car there while she went out with someone else...

...at one time his influence had helped achieve a brief cease-fire...

...Haughey calls for: an end to British Direct Rulemthe Unionists should ri:alize that the British were quite willing to desert them and make deals with Eamon DeValera and the IRA when it served British interests...

...Hugh Murphy...

...One typical experience: Sean Mackin, 19, swears that during three days of questioning at Castlereagh jail, police, to make him confess to a kidnapping and shooting, punched him continually in the face and stomach, pulled his hair, speadeagled him against the wall leaning on his fingertips, pulled his testicles, kicked him, beat the soles of his feet with a leather strap, screamed at him and threatened to kill him...

...Then, to be absolutely sure, they planted their own charges and blew it up--flipping it upside down over 30 yards away--for in Belfast any unattended auto might harbor a hidden bomb...

...ICC priest William Arlow had, for some time, been promoting secret meetings between government leaders and terrorists on both sides...

...This left one mysterious car standing alone...

...Would it be too much for a while to ask the Irish to do without some of their songs...

...Terrorism and the oppressive counter-reaction of the state can co-exist and feed on one another in a society that has no mature, shared sense of itself, in a rigid, static society that does not adapt to the changing personal and cultural aspirations of its members, one where ordinary communication between the dominant power group and the isolated minority has broken down...

...More than anything the young need jobs--to break the cycle where in some Catholic neighborhoods almost hail the adult men are unemployed and the young men leave school at 16 and "go on the dole," and drift, out of boredom, against their mothers' pleas, into paramilitary organizations where older men put "meaning" into their lives by teaching them to booze, sin...

...But the major question is what kind of formula will bring a long-term political solution...

...4 August 1978:488...

...A few minutes before, I had talked with the unfortunate owner of the car...

...We had laughed during the week when someone quoted Gladstone, "Every time we get an answer to the Irish question the Irish change the question...

...While the poor husband sorted through the wreck, a group of Americans with cameras fluttered around, struck poses and asked the constable on guard if he would pose with them by the ruinmas if he were a Royal redcoat at Buckingham Palace gate...

...recognition that "without enormous and unthinkable movements of population, an entirely British Ulster or an entirely Gaelic Ireland are unobtainable...

...Fourth, international public opinion and private charitable financing should probably pay less attention to the so-called "peace people" who have received a lot of publicity but represent a constituency of only a few thousand and more to the various community action projects concerned with both neighborhood reconciliation and social justice...

...If there is a Labor victory in the British elections--which is in doubt because of the eeonomymthis may give Britain the means, perhaps with American encouragement, to finally withdraw and free itself from one more guilty burden of an Empire...

...Thus it is to their interest to settle now for a federation (Commonweal, May 26, 1978) that will meet Catholic needs and proCommonweal: 487 tect leg[timate Protestant interests...

...They averaged a death a day for ten days...

...business investment there rather than wait for the situation to stabilize...

...People told conflicting stories and warned us against believing what we heard from everyone else...

...Meanwhile the Ulster Defence Regiment and the British Army arrived in armored trucks and full combat regalia and ringed the property, lest this were a plot to suck in police targets for a sniper and bombing attack...

...But I had shudderedm because she was close to the truth~when a young woman suggested that Ireland needed a frontal lobotomy to free it from its past...

...These men, and the Provo IRA as well, are no more a legitimate political party or a real army fighting a just war than is the mafia...