THE attention of all Ireland was focused last weekend on the predominantly Catholic town of Newry (pop. 15,000) in Ulster. As Sunday approached, thousands of demonstrators —and newsmen as well—poured into the town in expectation of another bloody confrontation between British troops and Ulster Catholics participating in an illegal protest march. Only 40 miles south of Belfast and a 15-minute drive from Dundalk, a major south-of-the-border refuge for Irish Republican Army gunmen and arms smugglers, Newry is well known to be an I.R.A. town. The British expected the gunmen—some even disguised in stolen army uniforms—to be there in force for the march.
Anticipating trouble, the army reinforced its troops in the province with the 550-man 2nd Battalion of The Light Infantry and threw up roadblocks in an intensive search for arms and terrorists. Civil rights leaders called the presence of the troops a provocation —a word that the British and Ulster Protestants thought might be better applied to the scheduled demonstration. Appeals to call off the march came from the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ulster and the Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, William Cardinal Conway, but all went unheeded. The fuse was lit, and the fire was ready.
The previous Sunday—Jan. 30, 1972—had already been inscribed in the terrible dark memories of the Irish people as "Bloody Sunday." On that bright, wintry afternoon, a march in the Catholic ghetto of Londonderry called the Bogside suddenly turned into a brief but violent battle between the marchers and British troops. When the shooting stopped, 13 people lay dead in one of the bloodiest disasters since the "troubles" between Ulster's Protestant majority and Catholic minority began almost four years ago. The incident seemed to end almost all hope of a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland. Not since the executions that followed Dublin's 1916 Easter Rising have Catholic Irishmen, North and South, been so inflamed against Britain and so determined to see Ireland united in one republic at last.
Direct Defiance. The Bogside demonstration, which was organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, was a Catholic protest against the internment of I.R.A. suspects. It was also a defiant challenge to Prime Minister Brian Faulkner's twelve-month extension of a ban on parades in Ulster by Catholics and Protestants alike. Somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 Catholics had gathered in Londonderry, where British troops in 1969 were first called in to protect Catholics from rioting Protestants. Last week, as the demonstrators moved down William Street toward the Bogside, they sang, among other songs, We Shall Overcome, the anthem of U.S. civil rights marches during the '60s. In burned-out buildings and on nearby rooftops along the route, British soldiers watched and waited.