County Armagh in Northern Ireland is a 512-sq. mi. patchwork of rocky grazing pastures whose southern tip juts 15 miles deep into the Irish Republic. This salient is populated by some 20,000 predominantly Roman Catholic farmers and dairymen, many of whom still resent the untidy mapwork that placed them in the British-ruled North rather than the independent South at the time of the 1921 partition. Armagh is a staging area for gunmen of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army (Provos), who frequently enter the country from sanctuaries in the Irish Republic to strike at British military targets, then retreat across the border. Since January 1975, 13 British and Ulster soldiers have died as the result of l.R.A. attacks in Armagh, which Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, recently described as "bandit country." TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron visited the embattled area and sent this report:
When you drive across the Irish border into County Armagh along the main road to Newry, the first hint that all is not well is the bombed-out rubble of an Ulster customs station. This ruined building and others like it on cross-border roadways have been blasted so many times that the British have abandoned both the shelters and any systematic policing of cross-border traffic. Five miles from the border, along a northbound country road, graffiti in large letters on a stone wall declare what is already apparent: THIS IS I.R.A. TERRITORY. BRITISH GET OUT.
In Armagh's sparsely inhabited countryside, British law begins somewhere above treetop level. There, the army's rule is uncontested, thanks to the whirring Wessex and Scout helicopters that swing back and forth across the terrain, deploying soldiers to hidden observation posts. On the ground it is another matter. Road travel by the 550 British troops in the area is so risky that it has been abandoned: the army either moves about by chopper or does not move at all. Disgruntled British officers claim that their troops are outgunned by I.R.A. forces, which are equipped with Browning heavy machine guns that command a range of 3,000 meters, v. the 1,000 meters covered by the British standard-issue general-purpose machine gun.
Vicious Traps. A favorite I.R.A. tactic is to put gelignite into a milk churn, then stand it by the roadside among dozens of other containers that farmers put out at night to be collected by the dairies. When an army patrol passes by, the terrorists detonate the churn by remote control. Other I.R.A. traps are just as viciously clever. A month ago, two Ulster policemen were lured by a false report into an isolated area, where they were ambushed and killed.