(2 of 3)
Fear of reprisals was a major reason for the strike's success. In the country town of Ballymena, two Catholic brothers who kept their pub open in defiance of the strike were murdered by a group of more than 30 hooded men. Finally, last week, the power workers threatened a total blackout, which would have stopped pumps at all water and sewage plants. Faced with the prospect of no running water in homes and hospitals and raw sewage flowing through the streets, Faulkner's government called it quits.
With 16,500 troops in Northern Ireland, Britain could have ordered the army to take over essential services at the beginning. Instead, Merlyn Rees, London's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, decided to wait out the strike. He assumed that the people, after a sufficient period of deprivation, would turn against the workers. It was a total misreading of the popular mood. Every day there were Protestant rallies and parades with cries of "No surrender!"
Prime Minister Wilson compounded Rees's error and stiffened Protestant resolve by going on television to call the strikers "thugs and bullies," and accuse them of "sponging on Westminster and British democracy." The Rev. Ian Paisley, one of the most militant Protestant leaders, immediately appended a sponge from his buttonhole, and some Protestants impaled sponges on their car antennas. "Wilson didn't talk to us and he didn't break us," said John Taylor, a key Protestant leader, with obvious contempt. "He didn't do either. He just called us names. He's played into our hands."
In Protestant neighborhoods the fall of the Faulkner government was greeted with the kind of delirious jubilation that marks a great wartime triumph. Bonfires were lighted in the streets, and huge victory parades marched with the red and white flags of Ulster whipping in the spring wind. Within two hours after the strike was called off, the province was alive again: hundreds of shoppers queued up outside stores in Belfast, and long lines of red city buses began taking commuters in and out of the city. Ulster's industry expects to be able to restore full production early this week. Roared an ecstatic Paisley: "We have secured the downfall of tyranny!"
With their first goal secured—the end of a coalition with the Catholics —the militant Protestants now want a new provincial election that will guarantee them control of the province. But Protestant rule would merely restore the
I situation that caused the Catholic Irish P Republican Army to begin its campaign of terror in 1969. Wilson will undoubtedly be reluctant to go back to the point at which the troubles started.
The Catholics have yet to act, but their mood is already one of anger. They feel betrayed by the British, whom they had counted on to protect their interests. They also feel that Rees should have used troops earlier to break the strike and save the coalition. Demanded a Catholic spokesman: "What's the logic of incarcerating one set of extremists [the I.R.A.] and not another?"