Teddy Boys with Tartans

A crowd of Belfast Catholics was watching an evening soccer game on the television set in Kellys Bar when a bomb exploded in a parked car outside, setting off a weekend of violence in which nine people were killed and 100 injured. The Catholics blamed the bombing on Protestant extremists; the British army concluded that it might have been caused by I.R.A. explosives that went off by accident. In a sense it did not really matter. The important fact was that after two months of direct rule from London, the Ulstermen were as close to anarchy as ever.

The new wave of terrorism was a setback for William Whitelaw, Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In the eight weeks since he had been sent to Belfast to replace the suspended provincial parliament at Stormont, Whitelaw had pursued a policy of conciliation and persuasion. He ordered the release of 306 interned Catholics who were being held without trial in prison camps under Ulster's Special Powers Act, and instructed British troops to avoid incidents in Catholic areas. He also allowed to remain standing the barricades set up and manned by the I.R.A. in the "no go" Catholic Bogside and Creggan districts of Londonderry.

Dour Mood. Perhaps inevitably, Protestant militants were infuriated by Whitelaw's strategy of restraint. They demanded that the barricades be torn down. To force Whitelaw's hand, masked members of the Ulster Defense Association, a militant Protestant organization, hijacked cars and used them to create a 24-hour barricade around the Protestant Woodvale district of Belfast. Unless Whitelaw sent his troops into the Bogside, declared the U.D.A., the Protestants would surround their areas with permanent barricades also.

Emphasizing the dour mood of Northern Ireland's Protestants, the leader of the militant Ulster Vanguard movement, William Craig, last week warned: "It would be prudent for loyalists not to ignore the possibility of civil war." Another cause of Protestant restlessness was a new I.R.A. policy of attacking targets in Protestant areas. Last week, for instance, from hiding places in Catholic areas, I.R.A. snipers killed a 15-year-old Protestant youth and wounded four factory workers. In the House of Commons, Whitelaw charged that the I.R.A. was deliberately trying to provoke the Protestants into counterattacks on Catholic areas, which would thereby strengthen the gunmen's hold on the ghettos.

If civil war does come, among those most eager to form the front lines at street-corner battles will be members of Protestant youth gangs known as the Tartans. Mostly boys between 14 and 20 years of age, they wear blue jeans and jackets and sport tartan scarves as symbols of their Scottish and Protestant ancestry. Their slogan, TARTAN RULES, is scrawled on gable walls in most of Belfast's Protestant ghettos.