DOHERTY, August 10, 1971, shot by British army. Edward, beloved husband of Marie, rest in peace. Mary, Queen of Ireland, pray for him.
AFTER four days and nights of guerrilla warfare, a ghostly stillness settled over Northern Ireland. But the rubble, the occasional curls of smoke and the death notices in the newspapers remained as hideous reminders of the worst outbreak of civil strife in the 50 years since the partition of Ireland. In its brief span, the fighting claimed the lives of 25 men and women, including three of the 12,500 British troops on duty in Northern Ireland. It sent at least 5,500 Catholics streaming over the southern border into the Irish Republic; it forced at least 1,500 Protestants to flee their homes; and it destroyed millions of dollars worth of property, including 500 homes and 50 factories and stores, in a region that was already one of Europe's most impoverished.
Yet the citizens of that embattled and bloody anachronism—known to its Protestant majority as Ulster and to its Catholic minority as "the Six Counties" —could thank their separate but equal gods that the toll had been no greater than it was.
Ulstermen could also be grateful that the peak of violence passed without an immediate widening of the conflict. The government had not declared a general curfew or a state of martial law; a widespread Protestant backlash against Catholic militancy had not appeared; and members of the illegal Irish Republican Army (the I.R.A.) had not resorted to mass terrorism. Nonetheless, the outburst marked a reversion to outright religious warfare. From Protestant and Catholic alike comes the warning in that pungent northern twang: "There's going to be a bloodbayeth, I'm afrayud."
Siege Mentality. To foreigners who have never known the Northern Irish or seen the drab, mean slums of their cities, it seems all but incomprehensible that a corner of Great Britain, that most gentle and civilized of lands, should be beset in this day and age by a holy war. Ulstermen themselves have often argued that the real issue is not religion but a complex combination of economics (an entrenched Protestant majority preserving its job preferences over a poorer Catholic minority) and political allegiance (to the British Crown or to a reunited Ireland). But as Irish Scholar Conor Cruise O'Brien, a leader of the Irish Labor Party, once observed, such arguments seem mostly designed to serve an Ulsterman's need for a particular image of himself and his nation. That image, "if not altogether respectable, is at least modern: 'We are not really living in the Middle Ages. So this is not a religious war; it is political. Twentieth century!' "