NORTHERN IRELAND / In the Shadow of the Gunmen

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The following year, as the attacks increased, the Tans retaliated. On Nov. 1, 1920, Kevin Barry, an 18-year-old medical student and I.R.A. volunteer, was hanged for his role in a Dublin raid. The Tans burned Catholic homes and even fired into a crowd at a football game, killing twelve and wounding 60. Nothing deterred the gunmen, who pulled off their most spectacular raid on May 25, 1921. The I.R.A.'s Dublin Brigade burned down the custom house, the seat of nine British administrative departments and the local government board.

New Life. Later, the gunmen fought against the newly organized Free State government, because it had accepted partition and taken an oath of allegiance to the crown. Even when Eamon de Valera, a commander of the Easter Rebellion, took over as Free State Prime Minister in 1932, the I.R.A. kept up the struggle. De Valera was ultimately forced to round up and intern many of his old comrades in arms.

Still the gunmen persisted, and during World War II they almost perished for so doing. I.R.A. diehards waged terrorist bombing campaigns against Britain during the war—sometimes with Nazi help. This so threatened Irish neutrality that De Valera turned on the I.R.A. mercilessly. He had three members shot; two more were hanged, while others languished for years in the dreaded Curragh internment camp. Proudly, Ireland's Minister of Justice announced in 1947 that the I.R.A. was dead.

In fact, it nearly was. When remnants of the army gathered at Bodenstown in 1949 for their annual ceremonies honoring Wolfe Tone, the Dublin Brigade, supposedly the strongest unit in Ireland, had barely 40 men on its roster. Political events of 1949 gave the I.R.A. a new life. In that year, the government in Dublin proclaimed the old Irish Free State a republic and took it out of the Commonwealth. Britain's Parliament promptly passed the Ireland Act, which has ever since been the mainstay of Protestant determination to maintain the ties with London. Under the act, Ulster remains a British province with its own Parliament, until Stormont chooses to unite the six counties with those of the South—which, of course, it defiantly chooses not to do.

Deprived Minority. The act strengthened the iron-fisted and arrogant rule of Ulster's Protestant majority. In many ways, Northern Ireland resembled a Southern U.S. state, like Mississippi or Alabama, where a minority—in Ireland's case, of Catholics rather than blacks—was systematically deprived of social and political justice. Catholics were herded into grimy urban ghettos like Londonderry's Bogside or Belfast's dank Falls Road. A graduation certificate from a Catholic school was usually enough to disqualify a man from a good job: in Ulster, Catholic unemployment is as much as twice the province's average. The persuasive power in Ulster was not so much the government as the Union of Orange Lodges (200,000 members). To celebrate King Billy's Day, Protestants wearing the Orange sash and bearing aloft portraits of William of Orange would parade through or near Catholic areas in an arrogant display of religious and political superiority.