TWO FLAGS OVER ULSTER

Friday, Aug. 29, 1969

Article Tools

Reprints

IN an extraordinary historical reversal, British soldiers last week were deployed for the purpose of keeping Irishmen from each other's throats. Some 6,500 strong, they were assigned their pacific role in Northern Ireland, whose two largest cities, Belfast and Londonderry, were still smoking after four nights of sectarian rioting between Protestants and Catholics.

In the latest manifestation of a bitter heritage of hatred that dates back nearly three centuries, eight Ulstermen lay dead and nearly 800 (including 226 policemen) were injured. Side streets along Falls Road, the principal thoroughfare in Belfast's Catholic section, were blocked by barricades of double-decker buses. British troops strung concertina wire down Crumlin Road, Belfast's religious Mason-Dixon line. To one side fluttered the Union Jack of the loyalist Protestants, and to the other, the tricolor of the Irish Republic had been briefly flown. The flags were apt symbols of the passions that divide Northern Ireland's two contending groups: the 1,000,000 Protestants, who fear eventual absorption by the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic to the south, and the 500,000 Catholics, who have been shortchanged in housing, education, employment and voting rights ever since the six counties that make up Ulster were split off from the 26 counties of Eire in the 1921 partition.

Crumpling Under Pressure. While the cities smoldered, Northern Ireland's Prime Minister Major James Chichester-Clark and his two top ministers flew to London to confer with Prime Minister

Harold Wilson and his Cabinet. It was no secret that the British were irritated with Chichester-CIark for his handling of the situation. A compromise leader who defeated his nearest rival by a single vote in the Protestant Unionist Party's balloting last May 1, Chichester-CIark had proved unable to stand up to pressure. When Protestant militants insisted that a group called the Apprentice Boys be allowed to march in Londonderry to commemorate the lifting of the siege by King James II's Catholic army in 1689, he gave in, despite warnings that riots might ensue.

During six hours of talks at No. 10 Downing Street, Chichester-CIark found himself under pressure once again. Under Wilson's arm twisting, he crumpled. He transferred command of the Royal Ulster Constabulary's 350-man riot squad and of the auxiliary police, known as "B Specials," from the Ulster government to Lieut. General Sir Ian Freeland, 57, the much-decorated British commander in Northern Ireland. Chichester-CIark consented to what amounts to the disarming of the B Specials, who used to keep their weapons at home but henceforth will be required to place them under central control.

Additionally, an investigation into the composition of the regular and B Special police would be headed by Lord John Hunt, leader of the mountain-climbing team that first scaled Mt. Everest. Other British aides will set up shop in the office of the Ulster Minister of Home Affairs and in Chichester-Clark's own office. To Northern Ireland's Catholics, the all-Protestant