Word: belfasters
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...last March, William Whitelaw had attempted a policy of "reconciliation" toward the embattled province's Catholic minority, and had even entered into secret talks with the I.R.A. But when the I.R.A.'s militant Provisional Wing broke the carefully negotiated truce and unleashed a brutal bombing attack on Belfast last month-in which nine persons were killed and 130 injured in one afternoon-Whitelaw felt that he was forced to take a stronger stand in dealing with I.R.A. terrorism; he was now determined, he said recently, "to root out the I.R.A. and destroy their capacity for further acts...
...discomfiture was the other side's comfort-and in this case, the Protestants were overjoyed. Masked members of the Ulster Defense Association started pulling down barricades in their own no-go areas when word was flashed that the army was moving on Free Derry. Later, in Belfast's fiercely loyalist Shankill district, bonfires burned in celebration. Among Unionist Party politicians, who had recently been calling him "Willie Whitewash" and accusing him of appeasing Catholic terrorists, Whitelaw was suddenly immensely popular. One of his most bitter critics, former Ulster Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, promised the government his "full support...
...dawn last Tuesday," reported TIME Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer, "an army patrol in the Turf Lodge area brought in what looked like much of the arms stock of C Company, 1st Battalion of the I.R.A.'s Belfast Brigade, complete with a framed coat of arms giving the company commander's nom de guerre as Martin Forsythe. A patrol had entered the house on Norglen Crescent shortly after 2 a.m. A boy opened the door and immediately admitted that arms were hidden inside. Sure enough, twelve rifles were neatly stacked in a cupboard, and about 6,000 rounds of ammunition...
Enraged Catholics. In Belfast's Rossnareen district, hundreds of children swarmed around three British Saladin armored cars, throwing rocks, bottles and homemade bombs. The Saracens careened through glass-littered streets, occasionally shooting rubber bullets from slits in their armor. Their arrival after nightfall was greeted by a din of children's warning whistles. Groups of women beat out tomtom rhythms with garbage cans to protest the army's presence-and the British failure to challenge the Protestant "nogo" areas set up by the militant Ulster Defense Association...
Twomey, the Provo commander in the Belfast area, insisted that the I.R.A. had given the British army plenty of warning before the Bloody Friday bombings. But one seemingly disillusioned Provo sympathizer retorted that the army could not possibly have coped with so many bomb warnings in a single afternoon. Many Ulstermen believed that Twomey's motive in ordering the bombing attack, which killed nine and wounded 130, had been to prevent his Dublin-based superiors from putting out any more peace feelers...