Word: belfast
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Since last summer's bloody rioting in Londonderry and Belfast, the Unionist Party government of Prime Minister Major James Chichester-Clark has belatedly pressed for the reforms in voting and housing long demanded by Northern Ireland's 500,000 Catholics, who are outnumbered 2 to 1 by Protestants. Most important, the government ordered the disbanding of the anti-Catholic police auxiliary, the "B Specials," and the transforming of the Protestant-leaning paramilitary Royal Ulster Constabulary into a civilian police force...
Given a fair test, the reforms might have reduced tension. Instead, they alarmed many Protestants. In an atmosphere of growing anger, Paisley warned voters: "You cannot talk peace until the enemy surrenders, and the enemy is the Catholic Church." The predominantly Protestant constituency of Bannside, northwest of Belfast, gave him a decisive victory over two opponents...
People's Democracy held a march in January 1969 from Belfast to Derry. The right-wing Paisleyite Protestants attacked the march every five or six miles. Catholic farmers and fishermen turned out to protect the marchers, and concrete working-class support gathered around the march "like a rolling stone...
Eammon McCann explained casually that a hundred people marched from Belfast knowing that they would be attacked at every step and that the cops were on the other side. "Those who love the world serve it in action." Yeats tells us. I understood that I would never really hear McCann until I had experienced much more...
When the British troops moved in, McCann said that many supposed that they were there to invade the area. McCann calmly told me that he thought that they would have lost a shooting war. By that time the war had spread to Belfast and eight people had been killed...