NORTHERN IRELAND / In the Shadow of the Gunmen

(8 of 10)

A strange mixture of secrecy and foolhardy openness marks the I.R.A. operation. On missions, the gunmen are often disguised by stocking masks, and move nightly from house to house to avoid arrest. Yet in the North near the border, army chiefs practically commute from home and family to their outlawed work. In the South, escaped internees hold TV press conferences. While I.R.A. men still execute informers, there are telephone numbers to call for accurate information on whether Provos or Officials are claiming credit for an operation. The war is one of both violence and propaganda.

Risky Thing. Today even I.R.A. leaders concede that the army is "under pressure" in Belfast from the British. "It's getting to be a very risky thing to pick off a tommy," admits a leading Provisional. "In three minutes the area can be sealed off." Elsewhere in Ulster, the Provos claim—probably accurately—that they operate with little risk of discovery. Farmers regularly call on the I.R.A. for armed protection as they go out to fill in the craters in roads blown up by British explosives.

The army boasts that popular support for its methods and goals remains strong among the Northern Catholics. Austin Currie, an opposition M.P. in the Stormont Parliament, agrees: "Because of internment, there is more support for the violent men than ever before in my experience." Very little of that sympathy comes from the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which three decades ago threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who joined the army. In his Christmas message, for instance, Bishop William McFeely of Raphoe condemned "the callous men who are now prepared to plunge this whole county into anarchy and strife. We must be on our guard against the untold evil that unthinking words and actions could do to this country."

Just as in the fight for the Irish Free State, when the bishops favored British rule but the priests sympathized with the republicans, there are plenty of priests today who openly aid the army. "We condemn them and we confess them," as one Ulster priest puts it. Some of them have called upon the hierarchy to denounce both the British practice of interning suspected revolutionaries and the guerrillas' use of violence. One pro-army priest, Father Michael Connolly of Tipperary, flamboyantly asserts that the I.R.A. campaign is "not just a war, but a holy war against pagans and people who have no respect for human dignity."

Many British officials seem to be convinced that the I.R.A. holds power at least partly by fear. More objective observers suggest that the army's power is based on its quixotic appeal to the Irish imagination. It is an imagination fired by songs and poems about legendary deeds and martyred patriots, such as William Butler Yeats' poem of the Rising in Easter 1916:

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn.

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.