STALEMATE IN NORTHERN IRELAND

...The Provisional IRA, which the British see as the root of all Ulster evils, was unequivocally a symptom 321 rather than a cause...

...They'll never dominate us...

...Paisleyites and Provos flourished...

...Instead, the island divided into a harsh sectarian state 320 above and a theocratic state below...

...The hunger strikers crystallized in their plight every sin of omission and commission ever committed in Ireland by British authorities...

...In a more benign manner, Britain opened and expanded the public sector so that between 1972 and 1978 employment rose by 33 percent in the middle-class areas of health, education, and public administration, thus diminishing majority fears that each Catholic job was a Protestant loss and effectively encouraging Catholics to rally around Northern Ireland's moderate Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP...

...Thatcher also beat a fast retreat from her brief and reluctant flirtation with an "Irish dimension"—the skewed "special relationship" that proved so costly for Charles Haughey, the Irish Republic's former prime minister—to the thumping of lambeg drums and other ominous noises made by Paisleyites who want a return of the good old days...

...Townspeople rarely speak to soldiers unless spoken to...

...A Brave New Initiative probably will await a Labour government (pace an SDP-Liberal alliance...

...Northern unemployment rates fluctuated between 6 and 10 percent over the 1945-74 period while wage scales were, even in the late '70s, 25 percent below those of the United Kingdom...

...Then Northern Ireland Secretary of State Roy Mason rashly announced the imminent defeat of the Provisional IRA in October 1977, only to be answered by 70 bomb blasts in January and, later, by the publicized killings of Airey Neave, Lord Mountbatten, and 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint...

...Occasionally a Saracen armored car straying too far into the outskirts is blown to bits by a Provo land mine...

...After a sporadic border campaign was canceled for lack of interest in 1962, the IRA "went Marxist," sold off its arsenal, and abandoned military adventures to focus instead on social grievances and political agitation, North and South...

...The power-sharing Executive, devised at the 1973 Sunningdale conference, was wrecked in May 1974 by the Ulster Workers' Council strike—more accurately, a lockout—abetted by the uncharacteristic timidity of the British army...

...Buoyed by the diffusion of postwar British welfare-state measures (opposed fiercely and unsuccessfully by the Ulster upper class), many Northern Catholics began to look askance on the stifling culture and stagnating economy southward and so—unity consigned to a distant day—concentrated on reforming the Northern regime...

...Despite the military presence, the Provisional IRA literally calls the shots in this classic guerrilla terrain...

...The people of Crossmaglen are an independent and critical lot, hardly Provo parrots...

...I shrugged...

...This heroic scenario presupposes that Margaret Thatcher is compelled to revert to a venerable tradition of Tory pragmatism, which, so far, is conspicuous by its absence...

...In spite of Paisley's bombast, Thatcher met Irish Premier Garret Fitzgerald a month later at a London Summit where she agreed to set up an "AngloIrish Council" to consider the "totality of relationships within these islands...

...A February 1978 Ulster TV poll showed that 51 percent of Protestants and 63 percent of the entire population polled favored another go at power-sharing...

...They now witness such mainstream luminaries as Merlyn Rees, former N.I...

...Responding to Protestant extremist assaults upon Catholic ghettos, the IRA revived and rearmed as a purely defensive force concerned more with sheer survival than ancient crusades to unify the island...

...but the niggardly economic performance overall did not inspire among Protestants enthusiasm for or confidence in a nondiscriminatory society...

...he is a very astute politician who responds to the felt needs of his working-class constituency and knows how to shape their opinions...

...A sentry tower in the center of the bleak town scans the wilderness (and, incidentally, overlooks a defiant and frequently defaced statue erected to honor those "who have died for Irish freedom...

...Finally he said, "Y'know, I bin 'ere six months now and I still don't understand these people, d'you...

...But forget Jimmy Carter's 1977 speech offering U.S...

...Determining that I was a harmless if foolhardy tourist, the young patrol leader relaxed and chatted about his visit to North America...

...Unskilled Catholic workers in West Belfast where unemployment is 50 percent were, for example, rather more familiar with the Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary than with the interiors of public-sector offices and steady paychecks...

...into her economic Iron Maiden, Thatcher's government skyrocketed Ulster unemployment levels up to 20 percent this year with, of course, Catholics and all Ulster youth suffering most—creating a choice recruiting pool for extremists and bigots...

...Since potential dissidents marched up the gangplanks of emigration boats to Liverpool (and became Labour party members) and to New York and Boston (and joined the Democratic party), a deeply conservative political pattern embedded itself in the South, so that even today the Irish Labour party and related independents account for less than 20 of the 166 parliamentary seats...

...Most Catholics certainly want the troops out, but the vast majority support the SDLP while one poll indicated that half preferred at present to stay in the U.K...

...The sample was admittedly small...

...Although the Protestant working class undeniably benefited from the "Prods first" policies, a stroll down both the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast will reveal that the living-standard gap is one between Catholic poverty and Protestant austerity— the maintenance of "different levels of suffering" as Geoffrey Bell tellingly writes...

...snipe and fade away again and again...

...Beyond the "Troops Out" sentiment, the British Labour party's program for weaning Ulster is as yet undefined...

...The agricultural Southern state and the Northern Irish province—which last boasted economic selfsufficiency in 1931—each initially believed that partition would scuttle the other...

...Carte blanche for Provos...

...Power-sharing may hasten the day when Irish men and women collectively attack the socioeconomic defects and inequities of the entire island instead of each other...

...But a lesson evidently was learned...

...I can understand that," he smiled, and moved off with the patrol to resume its duties...

...though people do sympathize with the plight of (most) ordinary soldiers who thrash around in a political conflict that cannot be solved militarily...

...What could be done now...

...Occasionally an army helicopter is hit by M-60 machine-gun fire...

...At the Tory party conference in Blackpool last October, Prior spoke of developing a plan to establish a new elected assembly, along power-sharing lines and with substantial powers, as well as an interparliamentary link between Westminster, Dublin, and the proposed Ulster assembly...

...Hence political inertia went on breeding physical inertia, that is to say, corpses...

...The Irish ancestry of our current president is no more likely to move him to repeat the offer than his advanced years stimulate any empathy for the elderly dependents on social security here...

...Clashes occured and the intensifying army repression culminated in an internment sweep on August 9,1971, which netted 342 Catholics and nary a Protestant...

...To retain their Green grass roots, the Provisionals must struggle on "many fronts...

...Employing clerical fire-breathers and scattering concessions to avert the scare of a nonsectarian working-class movement in the early 1930s, the Northern ruling elite ensured many decades of political hegemony through the Unionist party and the Orange Order...

...In that perceptive regret lies the tragedy and the thin hope of bloody Ulster...

...Despite the October 3rd collapse, the H– block hunger strike has generated enormous international pressure upon the British to introduce and enact a fresh and fundamental political initiative...

...in both, political ideologies were disfigured and economic issues obscured by the fact of partition...

...After a dozen years of carnage and ruin, the times are as "ripe" as they ever will be for the installation of a power-sharing framework...

...The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed in the late 1960s to struggle against discrimination in housing and employment, for local government reforms and the right of free speech and assembly, with brutal results—images of the B-Specials and the Burntollet Bridge—televised around the world...

...Stringent security policies testify to the wish of the South to remain a "safe haven" from, not for, paramilitaries...

...As for the Provisional IRA and the split-off Irish National Liberation Army, support for the military campaign would dry up (eventually) if Catholics perceived and participated in a stable and fair power-sharing scheme...

...Catholics, of course, bore the brunt...

...SINCE A STRANGER in Crossmaglen stands out like a carnival clown in Ian Paisley's congregation, I was stopped for identification by a British army patrol—no--a Royal Marine patrol, as the leader proudly and curtly corrected me...

...Then yet another zealot, Margaret Thatcher, burst upon the scene and devoured the carrot...

...If a British government forcefully revived a credible power-sharing arrangement together with antidiscriminatory measures, a Bill of Rights, and a loosening of the purse strings, a genuine light might flicker and beckon at the end of the proverbial tunnel...

...Traditionally proud of "living by their wits," the people of Crossmaglen have withstood a decade of sophisticated surveillance, primitive interrogations, "detentions," and a multitude of minor indignities and harassments, which make up their daily contact with an army that is allegedly there to protect them from terrorists...

...Thatcher's steely determination is precisely what is needed to see a new power-sharing venture through...

...The Bloody Sunday killings of 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators in Derry five months later punctuated the point...

...Despite an annual U.K...

...Gerry Adams, a self-described "socialist republican" and Provisional Sinn Fein vice-president, said at that organization's 1980 annual convention, "There can be no military victory...

...Protestant paramilitary groups would wage their own war across an Ireland into which they were forcibly inserted...

...However, the feeble Consultative Assembly proposed by Humphrey Atkins, Northern Ireland's former secretary of state, had not been a promising start...

...The Provos captured the document...

...under, of course, a new and fair governing structure...

...The "Officials" called their own cease-fire in 1972 and ever since have bitterly criticized the Provos—to the point of exchanging gunfire— for waging a war that is reactionary and divisive (of the working class...

...When British troops (under the succeeding Labour government) failed to oppose the bully-boy tactics of Protestant paramilitaries in the streets and at workplaces the following spring, the Ulster Worker's Council strike gathered momentum, and so the Executive fell in May 1974...

...Prior also announced his intention to restore "political life to the North" with a "degree of prosperity...

...Crossmaglen nestles in the scenic countryside of South Armagh—two miles from the Irish Republic—in the midst of a notorious area known to British forces as "bandit country" or, more starkly, the "murderers' triangle...

...But stereotypes fail under scrutiny...

...Helicopters must supply the outpost since the roads are lethal...

...He pondered a moment...

...Another opinion poll carried out for Fortnight magazine last year claimed that 77 percent of the Ulster population were willing to give power-sharing "a try" and would "try hard to make it work...

...Plunging headlong into industrialization in the early 1960s, the Southern state adopted a "softly, softly" approach to the North in the hope that converging economic conditions would pave the way to unity along a yellow brick road of industrial prosperity...

...When Paisley tried to repeat the stoppage in May 1977, the strike quickly fizzled as the authorities stepped firmly in, enabling the trade unions to resist intimidation by the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force as well as an assortment of other Orange heavies...

...A trick question...

...Whether an "Irish dimension" (the prospect of unification) is omitted or placed in tactful abeyance is politically a matter of the subtlest semantics, but Catholic and Protestant demands are not altogether incompatible...

...However phased, a British commitment to withdraw the troops would remove the hardliners' raison cretre and perhaps accelerate the shift to those other "fronts...

...But no cuddling with the Irish Republic allowed...

...nor was the adamant incomprehension with which Margaret Thatcher views the rioting in, so to speak, her own cities an encouraging sign...

...The political wing of the Provos is moving leftward...

...The Unionist party ruptured when most Protestant workers broke to the right to preserve their "petty privileges...

...These occasions add up...

...It was after all Edward Heath, a Tory prime minister, who cleared the decks for the ambitious power-sharing Executive and 78-seat Assembly devised at Sunningdale in December 1973...

...Aside from ingrained bigotry, substantial fears were aroused in a "zero-sum society" in which the decline of the traditional ship-building, textile, and engineering industries was only slowly countered by fresh, job-creating investment...

...Direct rule" blended benign bureaucratic reforms with the Army's directive to sally forth and wipe out the Catholic paramilitaries...

...The stances of Paisley's Democratic Unionist party on issues of economic policy and social welfare are remarkably similar to those of the Social Democratic and Labour parties...

...secretary, who questioned the self-sabotaging guarantee to the Protestant majority that Britain would not impose a solution without their full consent, and heard James Callaghan, Britain's former prime minister, call for a "broadly independent Ulster"— whatever that may be...

...The Protestant economic elite of Ulster agitated for separation of the six counties (which contained most of the industry and half the industrial workers of Ireland) to perpetuate its own rule and profits...

...The partition of Ireland was not simply a wicked British plot...

...The British pried reforms out of the Stormont regime only to ignite a ferocious outbreak of sectarian killings by the Protestant paramilitary organizations...

...Labour government retreated into direct rule of the province...

...In the South, both major parties evolved—if that's the word—from a civil war over the disputed treaty that concluded the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21 and affirmed the separate status of British Ulster...

...No Northern Irish town would appear more likely to endorse the Provisional IRA's campaign to hurtle the predominantly Protestant province into what doubtless would be a gruesome kind of unification with the Republic...

...A long overdue day, as the Crossmaglen man remarked...

...324...

...Although half the wealth of Northern Ireland is owned by the top 5 percent, the ownership of two-thirds of the wealth by the top 5 percent in the Irish Republic does not speak well for the fate of visionary republican ideals there...

...Contrary to the albeit self-promoted media image, Paisley is no nut...

...Moreover, moderate Catholic and Protestant politicians floundered impotently in a political wilderness devoid of fresh British institutional initiatives...

...Afterward the UDA forsook Rev...

...Ian and proclaimed its own proposals for an "independent Ulster," with safeguards for Catholics and power-sharing for all...

...Townspeople claim that the Provo attacks are, more or less, proportional to the degree of Army harassment...

...Poverty-level Protestants overall outnumber the Catholic poor...

...One memorable evening I listened as they rued partition, particularly for the historical loss of the secularizing and "normalizing" influence that the 1 million largely industrial Protestant workers might well have exercised upon the politics and the culture(s) of a united Ireland since the 1920s...

...Ostensibly a buffer between bellicose Protestants and imperiled Catholics, British troops intruded in August 1969 "in aid of the civil power"—which aligned them with a faltering regime regarded increasingly by Catholics as unreformable and illegitimate...

...aid to a reasonably pacific Ulster...

...Behind the tower sprawls a tin-can House of Usher construction where the troops reside—Paras, Scots Guards, Royal Marines, and other regiments, in rotation...

...Imposing direct rule in 1972, Westminster cast about for a workable political formula...

...Snipe and fade away...

...Bobby Sand's election to Parliament (as well as the election of two more H–block hunger strikers in the South) was by no means an endorsement of the Provisional IRA's war...

...The Colonel Blimp mentality of the Officer Corps is universally scorned...

...An Army document authored by Brigadier Jim Glover estimated that the Provos could continue the war a minimum of five more years and, by the way, acknowledged them as a disciplined, politically motivated force...

...Foremost, the election repudiated policies that combined malign neglect with complacent repression...

...Disdaining the Marxism of the "Official" IRA, the Provos split off to undertake an all-out campaign for unification...

...It also demolished many years' work by British propagandists who portrayed Ulster exclusively as a "security problem...

...In the course of shutting the entire U.K...

...It would indeed be risky—the bloodbath specter—but the alternative to date is bloodstained immobilization...

...A pubkeeper's son, while attending and graduating from Oxford, perplexes British officers who prefer their Irish Catholics in tidy lower-class categories...

...After the collapse of two more mildly mannered initiatives and of the informal 1975 Provo negotiations (amidst escalated spates of sectarian killings by unproscribed Protestant paramilitaries), the U.K...

...The Irish Republic can't afford Ulster, and even 322 the most nationalist of Southern politicians believe that immediate unification would generate a horror show...

...He is a tough and amibitious realist who has been permitted to reinforce much of the reality he perceives...

...subvention of $3 billion, Northern Ireland had the highest rate of unemployment, lowest standard of living, and the highest cost of living in the United Kingdom...

...Occasionally a soldier is shot dead in a Provisional IRA (Provo) ambush...

...Nonetheless, the carrot and the stick dueled one another...

...Statistically anyway, Ulster's living standard still surpasses the South by 16.6 percent...

...62 percent of Labour's members support Tony Benn's "Troops Out" position...

...The Crossmaglen man quoted above was a prominent member of NICRA...

...The recent restructur323 ing of the Provos into tiny four- to six-man "Active Service Units" may have improved their military capability at the expense of isolation from much of the Catholic community...

...I think they just want to be left alone...

...Nonetheless, Northern Ireland's newly appointed Secretary of State James Prior not only refrained from gloating at the hunger strike collapse but granted several of the prisoners' demands...

...No Northern Irish community could recite more reasons for wanting the "Brits Out...

...If forthcoming, the prospect of economic aid from the European Economic Community would ease the zero-sum dilemma...