IRELAND: A Political Respite

Political campaigns, of a sort, were taking place in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic last week. The violence in Ulster had not exactly stopped. Two Catholic mailmen were ambushed and machine-gunned to death one afternoon, and three British soldiers were killed during the week. A new technique of terrorism was also discovered: the booby-trapping of some books on the shelves of a Londonderry public library. But the center of attention, for once, was not the mindless murder of innocents but the British government's latest efforts to restore some kind of...