Word: belfast
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stuff of daily life. There are threats and occasionally even executions. It sounds like Al Capone's Chicago or Mafia-dominated Sicily in the days of gangland wars. But instead, all those evils are flourishing in today's Northern Ireland in neighborhoods controlled by extremists. Says Brian Feeney, a Belfast city councilor: "This is real godfather stuff. Everybody pays. If you don't, they threaten to harm your family or workers...
...Belfast the nightmare began in the late 1960s, when the long political conflict involving pro-British Protestants and Catholic nationalists turned violent. The gun battles and bombings of the 1970s reduced whole blocks to rubble, and some neighborhoods became deadly "no-go" zones, where even Ulster police and British troops feared to enter. When at last the violence began to subside in 1982, Britain backed a major face-lift for the blighted city. Crumbling old slums and bomb sites were rebuilt as part of a $1.4 billion housing program for low-income districts...
...Irish Republican Army commandos figured on a turkey shoot. What they got was a bloody shoot-out. Late last week a bulldozer carrying a bomb rammed the gates of a police station in the village of Loughgall, 30 miles from Belfast. Just before the device exploded, wrecking the building, masked terrorists leaped from a blue van and raked the post with gunfire. But the station was empty; tipped off in advance, the police had cleared out. Suddenly a team of the British army's crack Special Air Service sprang from hiding and opened fire...
...friends, the baby-faced Gerard Steenson, 29, a founder of the terrorist Irish National Liberation Army, was known as "Pretty Boy." But when he was buried in Belfast last week, some recalled his other nickname: "Dr. Death." Steenson, gunned down as he and an associate drove through West Belfast, had been accused of killing at least half a dozen people over the past decade...
Remembrance takes place in war-torn Belfast, a setting that would seem to be full of ripe dramatic material about the effect of war on families. Unfortunately, the family relationships in Reid's 1984 play range from the incredibly bland to the inexplicably volatile...