NORTHERN IRELAND / In the Shadow of the Gunmen

"The country is gone mad. Instead of

countin' their beads, now they're countin' bullets;

their Hail Marys and their paternosters are burstin' bombs —burstin'

bombs, an' the rattle of machine guns; petrol is their holy water;

their mass is a burnin' buildin'; their De Profundis is 'The Soldiers'

Song,' an' their creed is, 1 believe in the gun almighty, maker of

heaven and earth —an' it's all for the glory o' God an' the honor o'

Ireland."

—Sean O'Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman

THE shadow that fell across O'Casey's Dublin during the 1920s has become the specter that terrorizes contemporary Ulster. Sections of Londonderry and Belfast are as desolated as London during the blitz, and the scarred faces of empty, bombed-out buildings are pockmarked from gunfire. Streets are blockaded by ganglia-like stretches of barbed wire and by "antiterrorist ramps"—thick bands of bitumen or concrete nine inches high that force traffic to slow to a crawl. On the red brick walls surrounding vacant lots, the children of Belfast—perhaps the most tragic victims of the war—have scrawled afresh the old slogans of idealism and hatred: "Up the I.R.A." and "Informers Beware" in the Catholic sections, "No Popery Here" in the Protestant areas. If nothing else, the signs are additional proof of the old saying that Ireland is a land with too much religion and not enough Christianity.

The last week of 1971 was typical of life in the dour, grimy Victorian cities of the North that are a battleground in the conflict between the British army and the outlawed terrorist Irish Republican Army. There were bombings in Belfast, Londonderry, Enniskillen and the village of Rostrevor. where the I.R.A. destroyed the country house of Ivan Neill, Speaker of the Ulster House of Commons. (Neill and his wife were away.)

On New Year's Eve, Belfast was rocked by eight explosions. Gunmen fired on a police precinct house, while soldiers had to break up a riot between Catholic and Protestant youths. Earlier in the week, a sniper in Londonderry killed a patrolling soldier. The trooper, 20-year-old Richard Ham, was the 43rd British soldier killed during 1971, and the 206th person since the major riots of 1969. As if to emphasize the sense of despair that pervades the province, the

British command announced that children playing with toy guns run the risk of being shot. The reason for the statement was that children in Ulster these days sometimes carry real guns.