NORTHERN IRELAND / In the Shadow of the Gunmen

(4 of 10)

Evil Spirit. The British hounded the outlaw Fenians. Toward the end of the century, though, Home Rule for Ireland became a realistic possibility. Its most notable advocate was four-time Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. He tried to exorcise the "evil spirit" of Ireland from Westminster by disestablishing the Anglican Church there and by providing British-government funds for Catholic peasants to buy land from Protestant landlords. Yet in any discussion of autonomy for Ireland, the sticking point was always Ulster, whose Protestants feared the consequences of any kind of separation from England. In 1886, Gladstone's government was defeated on the Home Rule issue by the Tories, the most vocal of whom was Lord Randolph Churchill (Sir Winston's father), who coined a ringing slogan that ardent Orangemen still remember today: "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right."

A Home Rule bill was passed by Parliament in 1914, but implementation was put off until the end of World War I, partly to ward off the possibility of an uprising by the militant Ulster Volunteer Force founded in 1913 by Irish Protestants determined to fight home rule. The war, however, brought a new complication: the Easter Rebellion. In 1905, the Fenians had reorganized into a formal political party called the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone). Eight years later, some of its members helped form the rebel militia that eventually became known as the Irish Republican Army. On Easter Monday, 1916, the poet Padraic Pearse, one of the founding heroes of the I.R.A., stood in front of Dublin's General Post Office and read out a proclamation declaring Ireland a republic. The Easter Rebellion was easily crushed. The British executed 15 of its leaders, including Pearse; about 3,500 men and 79 women were placed under arrest.

The brutality of suppression made heroes and martyrs of the wild-eyed I.R.A. troopers in their makeshift gray-green uniforms and slouch hats. Many of them refused to lay down arms even after partition in 1921. This established the Irish Free State in the South, and in the North left six counties of Ulster predominantly Protestant (see map) as an integral part of the United Kingdom, with its own Parliament at Stormont. First the gunmen fought against the Black and Tans, the hated English force that policed the last vestige of British rule in the early '20s, an era immortalized in John Ford's classic film The Informer.

Stealth and Ambush. The exploits of those years of remembered glory were characterized by stealth, ambush, assassination and intimidation. Arms caches and the police were the main targets. On Jan. 21, 1919, gunmen raiding a cart of explosives killed two Royal Irish Constabulary guards, thereby causing the first British deaths since the Easter Rising. Gunmen began ambushing the constables from behind walls and ditches. In November 1919, a daring raid by the I.R.A. Cork Brigade cleaned out the arms from a British sloop in Bantry Bay. The Irish public tacitly supported the cause with boycotts of British goods.