Word: belfast
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Year's Eve, Belfast was rocked by eight explosions. Gunmen fired on a police precinct house, while soldiers had to break up a riot between Catholic and Protestant youths. Earlier in the week, a sniper in Londonderry killed a patrolling soldier. The trooper, 20-year-old Richard Ham, was the 43rd British soldier killed during 1971, and the 206th person since the major riots of 1969. As if to emphasize the sense of despair that pervades the province...
Along the grim, wind-whipped streets of wintry Belfast, there were also ironic, even humorous touches. On New Year's Eve, thanks to the terrorists, there were 30 fewer pubs than last year in which to celebrate the passing of 1971. To some, the prevalence of pub bombing made it seem as if the war were being fought by the Temperance League rather than the I.R.A.; it has secretly pleased some Presbyterian elders. Many customers, scared of the pub warfare, quit early. This has given rise to dour little jokes. The long-suffering wife of a drinking husband supposedly says...
...Protestant majority. In many ways, Northern Ireland resembled a Southern U.S. state, like Mississippi or Alabama, where a minority?in Ireland's case, of Catholics rather than blacks?was systematically deprived of social and political justice. Catholics were herded into grimy urban ghettos like Londonderry's Bogside or Belfast's dank Falls Road. A graduation certificate from a Catholic school was usually enough to disqualify a man from a good job: in Ulster, Catholic unemployment is as much as twice the province's average. The persuasive power in Ulster was not so much the government as the Union of Orange...
...eventual decision to form a "national liberation front." The so-called Provisionals of Sean MacStiofáin insisted on military means first. Although most of the I.R.A. units opted for the Provos, the division between the rival groups was and is bitter. For a time, army units in Belfast spent as much time fighting each other as they did the British. A tenuous truce was worked out last March, even though the branches publish separate newspapers, support separate arms of the Sinn Fein, and have no common strategy councils...
...lease on life. In that year, Ulster's Catholics, with the support of liberal Protestants, began their civil rights demonstrations for better homes, jobs and an equitable voice in the Stormont government. The protests turned into bloody riots. Mobs of Protestants marched through the Catholic ghettos of Londonderry and Belfast, burning and beating, while the Royal Ulster Constabulary and dreaded Protestant "B special" police auxiliary forces either participated or looked the other way. The riots and their aftermath brought Firebrand Reformer Bernadette Devlin to the fore as an eloquent spokesman for Catholic rights. The troubles also brought to Ulster brigades...