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Among ordinary Ulster citizens, there was considerable sympathy for some of the reform demands. O'Neill, a patrician, soft-spoken former Irish Guards captain who has been Prime Minister since 1963, was already trying to parlay that sympathy into a vote of confidence in his gradual program for equality. But when activist demonstrators began joining the protest ranks, extremist groups within O'Neill's Unionist Party reacted violently. Among the first to express its ire was the oligarchic Orange Order, a powerful political-religious society whose members have included all Prime Ministers and virtually every Cabinet Minister in Northern Ireland's history. Like others, it has been particularly skillful in playing on the fears of Orangemen that all Catholics secretly want "to do away with the border" and rejoin Eire, despite a recent poll showing that 70% of Ulster's Catholics favor some form of continuing association with Britain.
For Protestants, perhaps the most galling provocation came last October when Catholic marchers paraded within Londonderry's Old Walls, a Unionist shrine. Convinced that the protesters had overstepped all bounds, Protestant bigots soon began organizing counterdemonstrations. Their spokesman was fiery Ian Paisley, leader of the extremist Free Presbyterian Church, who rarely misses an opportunity to vent his rabidly anti-Catholic views. He refers to the Roman Catholic church as "the greatest dictatorship in the world," and his newspaper has come up with the singular suggestion that the Viet Nam war is a Jesuit conspiracy.
Fenian Bastards. Paisley's chief bad-german was a blustery ex-Royal Engineers officer named Major Ralph Bunting, who had been attached to a number of far-out political causes before teaming up with Paisley a year ago. Bunting's Boys soon began laying in wait for protest marchers, first to block their path and later to knock heads. Over New Year's, they bird-dogged a line of student demonstrators on a four-day, 75-mile protest walk from Belfast to Londonderry. On the final day, they ambushed the students, who reached their goal with 81 injured. That night, Londonderry's police—many of them Paisley sympathizers—staged a raid on Bogside, the Catholic slum area. They beat passersby, smashed windows and shouted into darkened houses, "Come out, you Fenian bastards." Catholics responded by setting up vigilante patrols to protect themselves, closing off their section of the city to normal traffic.
At an emergency Cabinet meeting two weeks later, O'Neill promised to severely limit demonstrations and bear down hard on lawbreakers from either side. He also proposed a high-level commission to look into what caused the violence, a move that Catholic Leader Currie hailed as the harbinger of "British democracy here." His followers and Bunting called off plans for further demonstrations, though Paisley last week carried his campaign to St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where he was pelted with oranges, to demonstrate against an appearance there by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster.