Northern Ireland: A New Voice

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Republicans keep Sands' seat

"Vote for me and give Thatcher a kick in the teeth. Vote for me and vote for the prisoners." That message, blared across the bucolic landscape of Northern Ireland's Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency, proved to be a winner in an important by-election last week. At stake was the British Parliament seat vacant since the death of Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish nationalists who have starved themselves to death in the Maze Prison near Belfast. The victor was Owen Carron, 28, Sands' former campaign manager, whose triumph over Protestant Kenneth Maginnis by 31,278 to 29,048 votes boosted the spirits of the Roman Catholic minority that wants independence from Britain.

Carron was helped by the coincidence that only 50 minutes after the polls opened, Michael Devine, 27, became the latest prisoner in the Maze to die as the result of a hunger strike. Serving a twelve-year sentence for illegal possession of firearms, Devine was, like Sands and the other would-be martyrs, seeking treatment as political prisoners for the 700 I.R.A. members now held at the Maze. In Belfast and elsewhere, rioters subsequently attacked police and British troops with gunfire and bombs; at least 30 people were injured, including three soldiers and three Northern Irish policemen.

Neither Carron's victory nor Devine's death was likely to soften Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's stand against the prisoner demands. Indeed, British authorities were encouraged when the family of 25-year-old Patrick McGeown, who had gone blind and suffered from severe head pains after 42 days without food, agreed to let doctors treat him. But some Catholics hoped that Thatcher might be influenced by a bold proposal from an unexpected quarter. In an editorial, London's Sunday Times, a pillar of the Establishment, argued that Britain should give up sovereignty over Northern Ireland.

"British policy in Northern Ireland—to try to keep it in the United Kingdom by general consent—has not worked, is not working and will not work," the newspaper declared. Echoing a recent speech by former Prime Minister James Callaghan, it suggested that the six counties of Ulster become an independent nation, enjoying economic subsidies and military protection from Britain. To prevent the Protestants, who outnumber Catholics 1 million to 500,000, from abusing their majority status, as they did before Northern Ireland's civil rights movement erupted in 1968, both Callaghan and the Sunday Times proposed a bill of rights enforced by judges from Britain, the Irish Republic and the new state. Countering the oft-heard argument that British withdrawal would provoke a bloodbath, the paper said: "The luckless British army now provokes by its mere presence part of the bloodletting it came to stop."

The voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone will not be represented in the House of Commons any more by Carron than they were by Sands, whose status as a prisoner prevented him from taking his seat. Carron does not plan to attend Parliament, or even draw his salary. Instead he will concentrate his activities in Ulster. Proclaimed the jubilant Carron after his victory: "The hunger strike will go on until the British government gives in to the demands of the prisoners."