NORTHERN IRELAND: A Grim Scenario for Doomsday

Ulster's Protestant majority, dissatisfied with British government efforts to re-establish a system of power sharing with the Catholic minority, establishes its own autonomous provisional government in Belfast. The Catholics react with unparalleled fury, and the two sides join in open warfare. Disgusted with the unending civil strife and the continued $1 billion-a-year drain on its own anemic economy, Britain decides to call it quits in Northern Ireland and pulls out its 15,600 troops. Ulster Protestants, who outnumber the province's Catholics 2 to 1, quickly win the upper hand, forcing the intervention of the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland. The entire island erupts in civil war.

That doomsday scenario, first proposed in a semiprivate memo by Irish Diplomat-Politician Conor Cruise O'Brien last month, is now being taken seriously by responsible politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea. Five months after a Protestant general strike brought down the short-lived Executive—a provincial government that included Protestants and Catholics—the sides in Ulster are becoming increasingly and intractably polarized. Last month's British election gave Ulster's Protestant extremists an even bigger share of the province's vote than they had received in the February election (58%, v. 51%) and ten seats in Parliament.

Exhausted, exposed and internally divided, Catholic militants in Ulster reacted in a now familiar way—with violence. The Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army sponsored disturbances in four prisons to protest conditions and the fact that an estimated 500 I.R.A. suspects are being held without trial. Maze Prison near Belfast (formerly the infamous Long Kesh internment camp), which houses 1,400 prisoners, was 75% gutted; 100 female inmates at Armagh Prison seized the warden and three of his assistants and held them captive for 14 hours. Catholic sympathizers held demonstrations in Belfast, Londonderry, Newry, Armagh, Lurgan and Strabane.

Brazen Killing. In the past month Protestant militants have undertaken a new campaign of sectarian violence.

Several young Catholics, most of them in their late teens and 20s, have been gunned down. In one brazen killing last week, gunmen drove into the heart of Belfast's Catholic Lower Falls area during morning rush-hour traffic, made a U-turn 60 feet in front of a British army sentry post, then came back and shot down two construction workers on their way to their jobs. Eleven Catholics have been killed in the past month and another 26 wounded. In addition, three Protestants have been killed and 14 wounded, presumably by I.R.A. gunmen.