Word: belfast
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With a touch of gallows humor the bluff but shaken citizens of beleaguered Belfast have taken to asking: "How many bombing days until Christmas?" In a heightened campaign of terror, the outlawed Irish Republican Army is apparently trying to bring the center of the city to a shuttered standstill by Christmas. Last week brought twelve major explosions and 27 deaths, the highest toll ever in Northern Ireland's troubled history. In addition, I.R.A. gunmen murdered three members of the Ulster Defense Regiment, a local militia with 6,000 members, most of them Protestants. One of the victims, however...
Fifteen persons, the largest number to die in a single incident, were killed when a large bomb, containing perhaps as much as 100 Ibs of gelignite, pulverized McGurk's Pub. a cheery, shabby Catholic bar located on the edge of downtown Belfast. As a British major helped direct the rescue operation, a sniper mortally wounded him with a bullet in the head...
Bedroom Snipers. The state of affairs in the most bedeviled parts of Belfast and Londonderry is simple anarchy. Bombs explode daily in hotels, factories and supermarkets. School halls have become barracks; bedrooms have become snipers' nests. In Donegall Square, TIME Correspondent John Shaw cabled from Belfast last week, Bren-gun carriers stand guard over the crowds hurrying home in the autumn dusk before the city closes down for the night. Bus service stops at 7 p.m. because arsonists of the I.R.A. have been setting buses afire to lure security forces into ambush. After 10 p.m., all main roads leading...
...another Belfast suburb, terrorists waved customers out of a pharmacy and a grocery on either side of a police station and then set off a bomb that killed a police inspector...
...violence keeps spreading, there are repeated rumors, officially denied in London, that Prime Minister Edward Heath will soon impose direct rule from London on the embattled province. This would hardly change the realities in Belfast. "We're already so restricted," one Ulster official complained, "that we have almost to phone London for permission to flush the toilets." But direct rule would amount to a confession that efforts at political reform had not worked as effectively as had violence...