Correspondents' Correspondence
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Ulster Report London—Recent disclosures by Maria...
...Apart from the poor immigrant kids and a handful from my development, the North Roslyn students came from affluent suburban communities a few miles away...
...My family lived on the fringe of the ghetto in a two-block postwar development...
...in effect, North Roslyn became a low-income ghetto school...
...Information about IRA leaders like Sean Mac Stiofan, Cory O'Brady or David O'Connell is readily accessible, and feuds within the organization were open knowledge to newspapermen and barflies long ago...
...Ireland-watchers never gave much credence to the image of the IRA as a tightly controlled, highly secret underground network, modeled along the lines of the Vietcong or Algeria's FLN...
...Their apparent unwillingness to crack down on the leading troublemakers may well be due to a reluctance to create martyrs...
...Besides, more is to be gained from watching the movements and contacts of IRA members out of prison than from placing them behind bars...
...Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Ulster Report London—Recent disclosures by Maria McGuire, a former IRA Provisional, concerning divisions among the terrorists, have caused a predictable rumpus...
...Everyone came together again at the Roslyn Junior-Senior High School, which had a total enrollment of 600 when I entered seventh grade in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court school-desegregation decision...
...In those days it was a Polish-Italian working-class ghetto in the middle of what remained of the North Shore's Gilded Era Gold Coast...
...These intersectarian vendettas are really a form of low-level civil war, and like the terrorism, there is no reason not to expect them to continue indefinitely...
...Terrorism in Ulster will probably continue for a very long time because, though politically ineffectual, it simply does not provoke the disapproval of the average Catholic...
...The community where I grew up, known variously as Greenvale, North Roslyn and Bull's Head, is located in suburban Nassau County, Long Island...
...In any case, it is unlikely that a strategy directed at Provisional leaders would aid the British Army in its efforts to eliminate terrorism in Northern Ireland...
...they were encouraged to major in auto mechanics, shop courses and homemaking, and they did...
...Yet much of the current debate seems to miss the point if you happen to be a white who was bused as a child for the purpose of obtaining a quality education...
...Unfortunately, the gloomy but likely prospect is that the Army will have to go on with its costly and delicate task of weeding out hard-core terrorists, even at the risk of offending Catholic sensibilities...
...The truth, however, is that most of what she related was scarcely news...
...The reason for this is all too clear: Random bombing and professional sniping are impossible to root out without the kind of large-scale and intensive searches that have in the past stirred up the Catholic masses...
...The Provisional campaign is the first serious attempt at urban guerrilla warfare in peacetime in any Western country, and aspiring "revolutionaries" elsewhere are watching to see if it can be made to work...
...For the sad fact is that while the IRA lacks cohesion as an underground organization, violence itself has become institutionalized in Ulster...
...The opening of the East Hills school in 1951 dramatically changed the demography of ours...
...The police have some 200 unsolved murder cases on their files but are unable to investigate them because of the intimidation on both sides...
...As the new subdivisions began filling up, it became clear that the richer children on the other side of the Mackay Estate would soon have their own neighborhood school...
...The significance of these problems extends well beyond Ulster...
...They negotiated with the principal and the district superintendent to have us transferred to East Hills school, where children were being educated...
...From 1949-51, I attended the North Roslyn elementary school, a two-story brick structure built before World War I. There was also a Greenvale School, but it was a private institution for the children of the landed gentry...
...Many of the residents were employed as laborers on the large estates of the wealthy...
...They know that political life cannot be resumed until threats of assassination and force are removed from the province...
...The British continue to hope that the terrorists will allow themselves to be tamely elbowed off the stage of Northern Ireland...
...Only when the courts ruled that racially separate schools are unconstitutional and made busing a tool of desegregation did it become controversial...
...There were the Poles and Italians from Bull's Head (it sounded tougher than Greenvale or North Roslyn—¦ and it was), wasps from Roslyn Village and Heights, a handful of blacks who lived literally next to the railroad tracks, and the children of the nouveaux-riches emigres from New York City...
...They were bused, of course, because the North Roslyn school was the only one around...
...Looking back today, from the vantage point of an urban affairs reporter covering busing controversies, I wonder how different it would have been for them had everyone in the area been bused to the same school beginning with the first grade instead of the seventh...
...My parents and those of a friend, Paul Guglielmino, wanted something better for us...
...In my fourth-grade class, very little learning went on...
...President Kennedy's "Irish Mafia" was a useful phrase in the early '60s, but the notion of a real Irish Mafia on Irish soil is something of a joke...
...They were expected to do poorly academically, and they did...
...Between Greenvale and these plusher places (Strathmore, Norgate, Canterbury Woods) lay the hilly Mackay Estate (since carved up into "Country Estates"), a pumpkin field, a potato farm, and a world of difference in outlook...
...Naturally, the governments in Dublin and London (who work more closely with one another than is generally realized) know as much about IRA activities as do reporters...
...No doubt such British "successes" in Ulster as the uncovering of arms caches is the result of this policy of restraint...
...In the end, however, what Belfast should teach them is that while terrorists are extremely difficult to put down, and can sustain a certain level of violence almost indefinitely, they can never really hope to win against a professional and determined army and government, especially if two-thirds of the population is bitterly opposed to the insurgents.—John Mander Busing in Retrospect Washington—As everyone well knows, busing has been going on for a long time...
...The irony, it seems to me, is that many of those who most vehemently oppose busing as parents now are the ones who would have benefitted the most from it when they were children.—Eugene L. Meyer...
...Of course, there were some drawbacks to busing...
...Tongues wag in Dublin as nowhere else, and although the IRA is illegal in Southern Ireland, a local journalist can pinpoint the pub where Provisional leaders can be found at any given moment...
...What moderate Catholic, after all, can be expected to participate in the running of Ulster when murder is in the air...
...The problem was transportation: For a year and a half, my father would drop us off in the morning on his way to the commuter railroad station, and Paul's father would pick us up around 4 P.M., giving us an hour after school to flip baseball cards...
...The logistics and distance involved made it impossible to play with classmates after school, and I remember feeling uncomfortable riding with the uniformed Catholic students who made it clear to me that I was not a Catholic, nor even a Gentile...
...During our last year, we were allowed to ride the school bus that ferried the Catholic students to the parochial school across the road from East Hills...
...it was anticipated that at some point they would be arrested for one petty crime or another, and many of them were...
...The Provisionals, who have attained great power by the use of the gun, would lose that power if they sought a political solution...
...Even more disturbing for the Belfast authorities are the Protestant-Catholic mobster-style killings that have so noticeably increased since William Whitelaw became Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland last March...
...Yet in our class-conscious 1950s suburb, most of the ghetto kids-?black and white—had already learned their place and nobody told them differently, certainly not their better-off classmates nor the school guidance counselors...
...There are, as Miss McGuire has reported, certain leaders who take a "dovish" stance, but behind them are ambitious young hotheads ready to take action...
...Nonetheless, East Hills was a better school than North Roslyn...
Vol. 55 • October 1972 • No. 19
