Word: belfast
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STAND FAST! KEEP CALM! VICTORY is IN SIGHT! implored the words scribbled on a blackboard at a Belfast street corner last week. The message was an appeal to Protestants in Ulster's latest, and perhaps most serious crisis. A province-wide general strike brought business to a complete standstill, forced most of the province's 180,000 industrial workers off the job and shut down virtually all shops. Ulster was on the brink of economic paralysis...
Last week most of Ulster's Protestant workers stayed home, as a sign of their support or because they were intimidated by the bands of cudgel-swinging, paramilitary youths roaming the streets to enforce the strike. Most of Belfast's main roadways were blocked; only doctors and others involved in essential services who had U.W.C. "passes" were allowed through its checkpoints. For barricades, the militants used hijacked cars and trucks, telephone poles and paving stones. Traffic in Belfast and most other Ulster towns came to a standstill. Fruits and vegetables rotted in locked shops, and electricity shortages threatened...
...center of the capital. Another 137 were wounded, many critically. It was the worst disaster in the history of the Republic and a far bloodier Friday than the infamous "Bloody Friday" of July 21, 1972, when nine were killed and 130 injured in a series of bombings in Belfast. The hatred of Ulster, where more than 1,000 have died in sectarian fighting since 1969, appeared to have flooded the Irish Republic with a vengeance...
...atrocity. So did the extremist Protestant Ulster Defense Association, although a U.D.A. spokesman said, "I am very happy about the bombings." Most of the skimpy evidence suggested that the bombs had been planted by Protestant firebrands. The cars containing the explosives had apparently disappeared from Protestant neighborhoods of Belfast. More significantly, Protestant extremists have seemed unusually nervous about recent agreements reached between Ireland, Ulster and Britain, which they fear are the first steps toward union with the Catholic south...
...Belfast businessmen demanded an immediate response from Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees. "You are to blame for all this!" yelled an embittered woman as Rees made his first official visit to Bel fast to inspect the damage. Most infuriated were hard-line Ulster Protestants, who feel that the new Labor Government is concentrating too much on a political solution and not enough on a military one. Shouted one irate Protestant as Rees clambered about the debris on Royal Avenue: "Root them out! That's what you must...