TRAILING jets of bright orange flame, gasoline fire bombs arched across barricades that sealed off the dreary Catholic slum of Bogside from the rest of Londonderry. As the bombs exploded among groups of Northern Ireland's constabulary, setting some men afire, the police raised their billy clubs and beat a sharp tattoo on their riot shields. That was the signal to charge. Repeatedly, the police slashed into the mobs, but each time the Catholics drove them back across the barricades. "We've had 50 years of it—the System," hissed a leathery middle-aged man. "It should be ended this time, once and for all."
Last week, beneath the fortress where Protestants and Catholics fought one another 280 years ago, religious warfare erupted again in Northern Ireland. In the worst outbreak of sectarian violence since Ulster was severed from the newly partitioned Irish Free State in 1921, bitterly divided Catholics and Protestants battled one another first with rocks, then with Molotov cocktails, and finally with savage gunfire. Despite the deployment of British troops, the first to be used against Irish rioters since the Black and Tans of half a century ago, armed clashes spread swiftly to at least ten cities and towns. At week's end, in a conflict that bordered on civil war, nine were dead and nearly 500 injured.
Unequal Treatment. Relations between Ulster's 1,000,000 Protestants and its Catholic minority of 500,000 have been severely strained ever since Northern Ireland was separated from the South. In the past ten months, however, sectarian bitterness has mounted, as Catholics intensified their protest against a system that had always shortchanged them in housing, employment and voting. It was a system that changed glacially, since it has been dominated by the Protestant-run Union Party and a Protestant oligarchy. Ironically, the Protestants were at last beginning to meet Catholic demands.
Though the Catholic leadership has been encouraged by the progress already made through protest politics, for some Catholics the issue had gone far beyond civil rights. They were openly calling on the Republic to help them. Protestants, for their part, grew more suspicious than ever that the rioting was a "popish" plot to reunite the two Irelands. Though such a solution is unlikely, the bloody outbursts raised the question of whether Northern Ireland could endure under its present government. Prime Minister Major James Chichester-Clark referred to the crisis as "our darkest hour."
Free-for-AII. That crisis might well have been averted by Chichester-Clark himself. After two outbreaks of violence in the past month, both Catholic and Protestant moderates called on him to ban sectarian demonstrations, including last week's annual parade to celebrate the end of the Catholic siege of Londonderry in 1689 (see box). In past years the parade, sponsored by the militantly Protestant Orange Order, has frequently deteriorated into a virulent, Catholic-baiting free-for-all. Chichester-Clark chose not to cancel the parade.