Word: armagh
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...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...
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...
...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...
...Northern Ireland, where killing has become almost matter-of-fact, the bloodshed, meanwhile, continued to mount, taking the lives of 20 people in only one week. In six years of fighting, 1,308 have been killed in Northern Ireland. The most outrageous incident occurred in south Armagh. While elderly members of a Protestant Orange lodge were attending their monthly meeting at the village hall, two masked men crashed through the door and sprayed the room with fire from automatic rifles. Five were killed by the gunmen, who belonged to a group thought to have close connections to the IRA Proves...
...Irish revulsion over Aldershot, the Official I.R.A. raised Ulster terror to a new dimension. At week's end, an I.R.A. murder squad pumped six submachine-gun bullets into John Taylor, 34, Northern Ireland's Minister of State for Home Affairs, as he started to drive home in Armagh. Taylor, who is boss of Ulster's security forces, was the first victim of a deliberate political assassination attempt. Though he was hit in the jaw, throat, chest and hand, Taylor survived after two emergency operations. But the murder attempt, less than a month after Bloody Sunday and three...