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A few days earlier, already under pressure to smash the I.R.A., Faulkner had flown to London for a secret meeting with British Prime Minister Edward Heath. Faulkner and Heath agreed to invoke the special powers of preventive detention—i.e., imprisonment without trial—for suspected subversives. Heath attempted to divert suspicion of impending emergency action by going back to his yachting immediately. A few days later he led Britain to victory in the internationally contested Admiral's Cup races.
Psychopathic Revulsion. At dawn one morning last week, soldiers began hammering on doors in Belfast, Londonderry and half a dozen smaller towns in Ulster, rounding up some 300 suspected members of the I.R.A. "We are acting," said Faulkner, "not to suppress freedom but to allow the overwhelming mass of our people to enjoy freedom from fear of the gunman, of the nightly explosion, of kangaroo courts and all the apparatus of terrorism." Then in a mild concession to Catholic opinion, he slapped a six-month ban on all parades, including the potentially explosive Apprentice Boys of Derry march scheduled for last week.
Northern Ireland's Catholics were furious. "There is one issue on which virtually every Catholic, moderate and extremist, antipartition and pro-partition, is united," said a Catholic lawyer in Belfast, "and that is an almost psychopathic revulsion toward internment." In its roundup, however, the army failed to snare many key activists. Some arrests were based on ten-year-old dossiers. Besides, as one I.R.A. leader told TIME Correspondents Curtis Prendergast and John Shaw, many men went into hiding or crossed into the Irish Republic after learning that jail cells in Belfast were being cleared to make room for detainees.
Bonfire Barricades. In no time savage fighting broke out in the cities, particularly in Belfast's Catholic ghettos of Ardoyne, Falls Road and Ballymurphy. Bonfire barricades blazed throughout West Belfast, and petrol bombs arched in the night sky like Roman candles.
Perhaps the most tragic symbol of the violence was a huge fire in Belfast's Farringdon Gardens, a "mixed" area where Protestants had lived peacefully beside Catholics for a generation. As fears rose, extremists set some 200 houses ablaze: many were Protestants destroying their own homes before fleeing to safer districts. "We're getting out," said one, "but no Catholic will get these houses." A Catholic resident lamented, "In winter we used to shovel snow off each other's paths; now everybody is cutting each other's throat."
Inevitably, a shower of bullets fell on the innocent. A parish priest was killed in a crossfire just after he administered the last rites to a man he thought was dying; the man survived to tell the story. On a Belfast street a young man, one of 13 children of an unemployed laborer, wept uncontrollably as he told his sister: "They say Dad's dead; they say he's in the morgue."