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A Psychic Wound. In fact, there were signs last week that the militant Provisional wing of the I.R.A. was considering breaking its own two-week-old de facto cease-fire to support a campaign within the Catholic community for the return of Dolours and Marion Price, two sisters who were jailed last November for their role in the Old Bailey bombings in London. The sisters have been on a hunger strike since their imprisonment; reportedly, they are now so weak that they have been given last rites.
In such Catholic ghettos as Belfast's Falls Road district and Londonderry's Bogside, there is a renewed spirit of hatred toward Protestants, who are taking every opportunity to flaunt their newly restored power. "Right's on our side," proclaimed Protestant Leader Harry West. "We are the majority."
Increasingly wearied by the seemingly inexhaustible hatred in Northern Ireland, a psychic wound beyond the physic of man, the British for the first time are thinking of what was once unthinkable: abandoning Ulster to its anger. There is a growing cry in London to bring home the troops and end the financial drain of about $ 1 billion a year. "If there is one thing I have learned, it is that the English cannot run Ireland." So said Roy Jenkins, now Britain's Home Secretary, in 1969—and he could well say it again. The trouble, as the past few weeks have tragically demonstrated, is that the Irish cannot run Ireland either.