"This could be the beginning of the end," remarked a constable at Belfast's central police station last week. "Everyone is going crazy." Even for Northern Ireland, that seemed an extreme statement. But last week, ten more people were killed in Belfast, bringing the total killed in Ulster since 1969 to 701; most were random victims of gunmen generating terror in the midst of a political vacuum.
More killing seemed inevitable. The militantly Protestant Ulster Defense Association, which only two months ago pledged that it would do "all in its power" to prevent back-street murders, announced at midweek that it could no longer control Protestant extremists. The Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, in an angry response, threatened to meet Protestant violence with "ruthless retaliatory action."
The renewed sequence of assassinations came as a shock to Ulstermen; since Christmas, the atmosphere in Belfast had been almost benign. British patrols had seemingly pacified the East Belfast area that had been the scene of many "sectarian" killings—the term routinely used in Ulster to describe cases where victims are murdered simply because they are Catholic or Protestant. Apparently exasperated by a delay in the publication of an anticipated British White Paper setting forth a new political structure for Northern Ireland, terrorists shifted their attack. Most of last week's shootings took place in West Belfast, where Catholic Andersonstown is separated from Protestant Donegal Road by the fast-moving M-l motorway. Suddenly violence cropped up there as gunmen used the motorway for an escape route.
The week's first victim was James Trainor, 22, a mechanic in a service station just off the motorway. Trainor apparently recognized the two men who drove up to his gasoline pump in a green sedan; he was hit by a fusillade of bullets as he tried to escape them. Peter Watterson, 15, was sprayed with automatic fire from a car as he stood in the doorway of his mother's candy store. Next morning, Francis Smith, 28, a former Catholic who had joined the U.D.A., was found face down in an alley near his home. The I.R.A. said that Smith's death was in retaliation for Watterson's killing.
That was only the beginning. Phillip Rafferty, a Catholic youth of 14, disappeared while on his way from home to a band practice; his body, with bullet wounds in the head, was later found five miles out of Belfast. Another Catholic, Gabriel Savage, 17, was pulled from his girl friend's arms at a shopping center and driven off to his death. Paddy Heenan, 50, was on a bus destroyed by a grenade as it drove through a mixed neighborhood. Two gunmen entered a paint store, lined up the employees, singled out James Greer, 21, a Protestant, and shot him. Another man, hooded and shot, was discovered in a parked car.
By week's end, the death toll also included British Army Sergeant William Boardley, who was shot while setting up a checkpoint on the motorway, and Robert Burns, 18, a Protestant. Burns was killed by machine-gun fire from a car passing a group of men who were standing outside a milk bar in Belfast's Old Park Road district.