The World: Ulster: Steering Toward Civil War?

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"Third Force." Not that Ulster's Orangemen were exactly waving the olive branch. Cries mounted last week for an armed "third force"—in addition to the British army and the overwhelmingly Protestant but unarmed Royal Ulster Constabulary—to fight the terrorists of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. One afternoon, in Ulster's largest hard-hat demonstration to date, over 20,000 Protestant workers assembled in a Belfast park to hear calls for "lead bullets, not rubber ones"—a reference to the rubber bullets the British soldiers use in trying to restore order. The crowd cheered wildly as the Rev. Ian Paisley, the province's Protestant firebrand, flailed the air and announced formation among Protestant loyalists of a civil defense corps.

With gun ownership rising steadily, the possibility of civil war is not simply an alarmist's dream. As of last April, there were more than 102,000 licensed firearms—everything from farmers' shotguns to automatic weapons—held by some 73,000 Ulstermen, practically all of them Protestant. How many additional smuggled weapons are being held illegally by both sides is anybody's guess. An immediate ban on all privately held firearms in Ulster is one of the twelve points advocated by British Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson. The Labor opposition in Westminster has also been demanding that the government recall Parliament for an emergency debate on Northern Ireland. Last week Ted Heath responded by announcing a two-day parliamentary session later this month—additional evidence that he is relying less and less on the Ulster government in seeking a solution.

Many Britons are convinced, however, that the efforts made so far are nothing but "whitewash on the sepulcher," as the left-wing weekly New Statesman put it—that Northern Ireland, in short, cannot survive in its present form. To be sure, the question was whether the week's political moves were too little and too late. The proposals for tripartite prime-ministerial talks for the all-Ulster round-table conference and for the two-day debate in Commons—or even Faulkner's hint at week's end of other concessions—might not be in time to reverse the upward spiral of violence. "No night passes without sporadic bombings and snipings, no day without bomb scares," TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast reported from Belfast last week. "On downtown streets there are almost as many armored cars as city buses. Steel mesh is going up over more and more shop windows.

Guards at government offices keep street doors locked and check callers in and out like jailers."