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Basically, the tragedy of Northern Ireland is rooted in the 17th century and not the 20th. Protestant Orangemen still commemorate the victory of the Protestant William of Orange in 1690 in the Battle of the Boyne; in Londonderry the annual Apprentice Boys parade memorializes the young apprentices who closed the city gates against the forces of the Catholic King James II in 1688. Such celebrations are not merely reminders of a rich heritage; they are also reassertions of dominance over the Catholics of the north and of vigilance against the Catholics of the south. Both of Northern Ireland's tribes are beset by a siege mentality: Ulster's approximately 500,000 Catholics feel politically powerless at the hands of its 1,000,000 Protestants; the Protestants in turn feel threatened by the 2,700,000 Catholics of the Irish Republic to the south.
The present chapter of Ulster's troubled history stems from the rise of a predominantly Catholic civil rights movement in the late 1960s. Slowly, grudgingly, the province's perpetually Protestant and conservative Unionist Party government made concessions to the long-neglected Catholics. Property qualifications for local elections were scrapped; public housing, which had heavily favored Protestants, was removed from political control; a system of gerrymandering that had ensured Protestant rule over the heavily Catholic city of Londonderry was abolished. Most important, from the Catholic viewpoint, was that the Protestant police auxiliary (the notorious "B Specials") was disbanded; and the regular police force, also strongly Protestant, was stripped of its paramilitary duties.
Cold-Blooded Murder. The reforms came too slowly to satisfy the Catholics fully, and they enraged the Protestants. Riots flared in 1969, and the British army moved in to establish barbed-wire "peace lines."
While Ulster seethed, two governments fell in quick succession under persistent attack from such Protestant extremists as the Rev. Ian Paisley and former Home Minister William Craig. Brian Faulkner, Northern Ireland's third Premier in 23 months, took office last March in a period of rising unrest. As a gesture of conciliation, Faulkner advocated the establishment of three new parliamentary committees, two of which would be chaired by opposition members. But Protestant and Catholic alike were lukewarm to the plan. As friction increased early this summer, Catholic opposition leaders boycotted the Ulster Parliament and threatened to set up their own alternative assembly. Guerrilla incidents, meanwhile, were on the increase—caused in most cases by the militant "provisional" wing of the old I.R.A., which favors violent means to achieve union with the Irish Republic. One of the ugliest incidents was the coldblooded murder—still unsolved—of three young off-duty British soldiers, who were lured from a Belfast pub last March and shot on a lonely road.
Last week's violence was set off by a tragic accident and the harsh action of a weak government. When a small delivery truck backfired at a traffic light in Belfast, a nervous British sentry apparently mistook the sound for a sniper's shot and gunned down the driver, a Catholic father of six. Catholic passions quickly rose to the flash point, and Protestant right-wingers demanded that British troops "take the gloves off."