NORTHERN IRELAND / In the Shadow of the Gunmen

(6 of 10)

The I.R.A. was less concerned with the repression of Catholics than with partition, but the resentments stirred up in 1949 gave it fresh hope. Under an austere new leader named Tony Magan who has since retired, the army between 1951 and 1954 carried out a series of spectacular arms raids—some in the North, some across the channel in England itself. Just before Christmas 1956, the I.R.A. struck against Ulster at 117 points along or near the border.

The campaign was a fiasco. The Catholics of Ulster were not then prepared to support the I.R.A.; the government of Ireland in the South was unwilling to tolerate a military invasion of British territory from its soil. By 1962, utterly humiliated, the I.R.A. called off the campaign.

The defeat led to a good deal of soul-searching and a severe ideological split. What became the smaller official wing of the army, led by Chief of Staff Cathal Goulding, argued that gunplay without political activism would lead to further defeats. This line led to increasing cooperation with Ireland's minuscule Communist Party and an eventual decision to form a "national liberation front." The so-called Provisionals of Sean MacStiofáin insisted on military means first. Although most of the I.R.A. units opted for the Provos, the division between the rival groups was and is bitter. For a time, army units in Belfast spent as much time fighting each other as they did the British. A tenuous truce was worked out last March, even though the branches publish separate newspapers, support separate arms of the Sinn Fein, and have no common strategy councils.

The army has always had a phoenixlike ability to rise from the ashes of defeat, and 1968 gave it another lease on life. In that year, Ulster's Catholics, with the support of liberal Protestants, began their civil rights demonstrations for better homes, jobs and an equitable voice in the Stormont government. The protests turned into bloody riots. Mobs of Protestants marched through the Catholic ghettos of Londonderry and Belfast, burning and beating, while the Royal Ulster Constabulary and dreaded Protestant "B special" police auxiliary forces either participated or looked the other way. The riots and their aftermath brought Firebrand Reformer Bernadette Devlin to the fore as an eloquent spokesman for Catholic rights. The troubles also brought to Ulster brigades of British troops, who were at first welcomed as protectors by Catholics offering tea and sympathy.