Like a revenger's tragedy, the violence in Northern Ireland never goes unanswered. On a Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, Thomas Begley, a 23-year- old I.R.A. member, walked into Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road in Belfast carrying a Semtex bomb that exploded, probably prematurely. Nine Protestants, including Michelle Baird, 7, and Leanne Murray, 13, were killed -- along with Begley himself. The reply came three days later at 7:30 a.m. Two Protestant gunman fired long bursts from automatic weapons into a group of city sanitation workers in largely Roman Catholic West Belfast. Two Catholic men were killed; five others were wounded. More killings followed. All last week the two communities were burying their dead and waiting nervously to see where this round of violence, one of the worst in years, would lead them.
Almost certainly it will not lead to peace anytime soon. Despite the example of Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East and blacks and whites in South Africa, the 1.5 million inhabitants of Ulster seem unable to bury the hatchet unless it is in one another. Part of the reason is that despite the mounting death toll, the problem of Northern Ireland is not considered sufficiently important to hold the attention of governments in London and Dublin, where the matter of Ulster and Irish partition must ultimately be decided. "The British," says Tony Benn, a Labour M.P. in London, "are not remotely interested in the Irish. When there is no trouble in Ireland, nobody discusses it. When there is trouble, it's too dangerous to discuss."
Even in the Irish Republic, unification is far down the list of national priorities, if indeed it ranks at all. Dublin is now preoccupied with European integration and getting its economic house in order. "We in the South have become so psychologically accustomed to partition that many people refuse to have anything to do with the North," says Garret Fitzgerald, the former Irish Prime Minister who worked out the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher. That pact gave Dublin a voice in negotiations over the fate of Northern Ireland and provided a new framework for discussing a settlement. But the momentum generated by the agreement has since stalled. "Both governments are to blame for the lack of progress," says Fitzgerald.
London, which has ruled Ulster directly since 1974, would be delighted to be rid of the security problem caused by I.R.A. terrorism as well as the costs of peacekeeping and economic support in Northern Ireland, now running at an estimated $4.5 billion a year. But the political risks of cutting loose a province that has shown consistent majorities in favor of union with Britain remain too high, especially for Prime Minister John Major, who now needs the votes of the nine Protestant Unionists in the House of Commons as a cushion to defend his thin majority. And if London cannot afford to lose Ulster, Dublin cannot afford, for economic reasons, to welcome it back into a united Ireland.