Word: belfasts
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THESE people-they're daft!" said a British Royal Fusilier private, at a Belfast checkpoint. No one from outside the six hate-scarred counties of Northern Ireland could disagree. Two weekends of rioting left a dozen dead, more than 300 wounded and at least 100 buildings destroyed. This week 100,000 Protestants are expected to march throughout the country in parades of the Orange Order, a religious-fraternal society that has been a seedbed of anti-Catholic sentiment for generations. More trouble seems virtually certain...
...with the Orange Order parades, which often seem less a remembrance of the Boyne than a rematch. Last week in Belfast, 1,500 British soldiers carried out a house-to-house search, collecting 130 pistols, rifles and machine guns, plus 25,000 rounds of ammunition. Young Catholics were said to be getting arms and advice from the outlawed Irish Republican Army...
...many factories shut for the annual two-week summer vacation, leaving thousands with time on their hands, paychecks in their pockets and nowhere to spend either but Ulster's pubs. All leaves for hospital personnel in main cities were canceled through parade day. Many prisoners were moved from Belfast to jails elsewhere to make way for the expected influx of new inmates. Despite pleas from Westminster and the Ulster government to cancel the 18 parades scheduled throughout the land, the only concession made was to reroute some away from Catholic areas. Catholics, meanwhile, began organizing counterparades...
...Canterbury Cathedral, carrying placards that read JESUS SAVES-ROME ENSLAVES. At the cathedral, a Catholic mass was being conducted as an unprecedented ecumenical gesture. Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland's Minister for External Affairs, Dr. Patrick J. Hillery, slipped quietly across Ulster's border to tour Belfast's battened-down Catholic districts. Though the visit was perfectly legal, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, branded it "a serious diplomatic discourtesy." The idea, said Hillery with a monumentally inappropriate smile, was just "to relax tensions...
...that held Northern Ireland together, it seemed, was the British army. Eleven thousand tommies under General Sir Ian Freeland patrolled Belfast and Londonderry and enforced a strict nighttime curfew. After the riots, General Freeland ordered his men to shoot to kill civilians carrying weapons. For a few days, such strict measures helped avert fresh outbursts in Belfast, even though 12,000 Protestants marched there in parades commemorating the 1916 Battle of the Somme in which 5,000 Ulstermen died. At week's end, however, pitched battles erupted between Catholics and troops who had discovered a cache of hidden weapons...