Word: belfasters
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...trip to Boston in a quest to regain his eyesight, which was destroyed by one of the British army's six-inch-long rubber antiriot bullets. Not for the 22-year-old Catholic girl maimed on the eve of her wedding when the Irish Republican Army bombed a Belfast restaurant. "Two legs gone, one arm sheared off, an eye lost, all in one young female body," said Dublin's Irish Times. "That equals someone's idea of patriotism in Ireland in 1972." In both Catholic and Protestant areas, isolated families are still pulling out and retreating into...
...I.R.A.'s fortunes have declined dramatically. British troops dominate the former I.R.A. strongholds. Tips on hideouts and arms caches are being whispered anonymously into so-called robot telephones, which are hooked up to tape recorders at police stations. "People are putting the finger on the Proves," says one Belfast Catholic politician. "There are no longer so many houses harboring guns, so the I.R.A. has to put them in the garden, in cellophane bags, and the army's digging them up. There aren't any demonstrations against the Proves, but people show their resistance. The curtain has begun...
...Irish mythology (of which it is already a part), the I.R.A. never quite dies. Nobody is yet willing to write off its military potential. Indeed, it recently added Soviet rocket launchers to its weaponry. There are also indications that a new generation of I.R.A. terrorists is coming up. A Belfast boy, 14, was arrested recently while teaching a class in bomb making. In fact, more than half those now being arrested for bomb making are under 22. But the I.R.A. may have already lost its war politically, in the sense that it no longer seems capable of influencing the shape...
...first day of 1973, like many other Ulster workers for whom New Year's Day was not a holiday, Jack Mooney, 31, father of three, headed for the night shift at the Rolls-Royce plant on the outskirts of Belfast. As he and five fellow workers who were riding in a blue Volkswagen pulled into the employees' parking lot, ambushers opened fire. A hail of 20 bullets struck the crammed car. Mooney was killed and two of his colleagues were wounded...
British authorities in Belfast say that the assassinations fall basically into two categories: those motivated by blatant sectarianism-extremist Protestants intent on murdering any available Catholic, and vice versa-and those motivated by revenge against suspected informers. In addition, say Belfast police, some victims have merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of last year's 121 victims, 81 were Catholics, as were Jack Mooney and the engaged couple of Donegal (the first such victims in the Republic of Ireland). But each side has been guilty of particularly gruesome murders, which have overtones of both wartime...