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The other force that also held itself in check in Northern Ireland was the province's Protestant majority ("the sleeping monster," as one senior British army officer called it) that outnumbers Catholics 2 to 1. On the day of Sands' funeral, Protestant Leader Ian Paisley held another memorial service, outside Belfast city hall, to commemorate the many victims of I.R.A. terrorism. Nonetheless, said Paisley: "Protestants will not react so long as the police and the army are controlling the situation in Catholic areas, and so far they have been doing that satisfactorily."
Even if wholesale sectarian violence is kept at bay, Sands' death and the continuing hunger strikes could create serious political hazards in the weeks ahead. Particularly threatened is Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey. Last December, he and Thatcher agreed to a series of consultations on the whole spectrum of Irish-British relations, an understanding that Haughey had hoped to exploit in an upcoming general election as a small step toward Irish unification. Now Haughey clearly has been weakened by the reaction to Sands' death. He has prudently decided to delay the upcoming election date, originally expected for this month, until at least June 10. But the approaching crisis with Hunger Striker Hughes could upset Haughey's strategy again.
Still to be determined is the full effect of Sands' death on Northern Ireland's Catholics, although it has clearly been huge, to judge by the funeral turnout. Says one expert on Northern Irish politics: "Never since 1969 has the Catholic community been so anti-British." Says a moderate Protestant: "Before, it was only the simple, unlettered people as a rule who backed the extremists. Now you're getting intelligent young Catholics who are really committed, and the same thing is happening among the Protestants. If we're not careful, we're going to wind up like Lebanon."
That comparison is far too extreme, but moderates on both sides feel that the British must find some way of heading off a string of hunger-strike deaths. John Hume, a respected Catholic leader of Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labor Party, feels that the British could work out a compromise on the political prisoner issue, allowing inmates some freedom of association and to wear clothing they could claim as their own.
But the mood in London is, if anything, surprisingly confident that nothing worse will happen. One senior Whitehall official repeated the government's refusal to compromise with the prisoners or to propose any solutions to the deeper problems in the near term. The situation was, he said, evoking centuries of bitterness, "a classic Irish tragedy from which at the moment there seems no escape." The desperate death of Bobby Sands appears to be the start of a new chapter in just such a prolonged and dangerous tragedy.
— By George Russell.
Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/ Belfast and Bonnie Angela/ London