Word: belfasts
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...Northern Ireland shuddered on the edge of civil war last week. Nearly every city and town was divided into two armed camps, as fanatic Protestants and rebellious Catholics faced each other down, ready to do street battle with stones, staves and worse. Skillful saboteurs triggered three explosions that cut Belfast's water supply in half. Post offices and a bus station were set aflame by fire bombs; police stations were stoned. Ten-year-olds trotted home from school with extracurricular instructions for making Molotov cocktails. More than 1,000 British soldiers moved into position throughout Ulster to protect reservoirs...
From the Barricades. Since last fall there have been a series of increasingly bitter street battles in Northern Ireland's two major cities, Belfast and Londonderry, and smaller but equally bloody clashes in villages as well. The latest round of strife began in Londonderry, which is Ulster's second largest city, with a population of 56,000, two-thirds Catholic. Youthful civil rights supporters staged a noon sit-down in the city's center, and a band of taunting Paisleyites appeared. When the youths tried to chase away their tormentors, the Paisleyites responded with stones, waving...
Down at Paddy McClure's betting shop in Belfast on election morning, the odds were 50 to 1 against the defeat of Northern Ireland's Prime Minister Captain Terence O'Neill. Even though the infighting within his Unionist Party had been severe and Catholic-Protestant hatreds were as vitriolic as ever, the odds makers-and a host of other experts as well-were certain that the electorate would come out firmly in favor of O'Neill and his policies of reconciliation. They were wrong. Most of O'Neill's hand-picked candidates had been...
...Catholics (who number 500,000 in a population of 1,500,000) have chafed with increasing bitterness under this arrangement. Through the years, clashes between Protestants and Catholics-especially in the capital of Belfast -have drawn enough Irish temper from both sides to make "Belfast confetti" a second name for paving stones. During the past five months, the bitterness has erupted almost weekly in a wave of demonstrations, street riots and vigilantism. The unrest has presented the country's moderate Prime Minister, Captain Terence O'Neill, with his toughest problem and most serious political challenge in six years...
...with Paisley a year ago. Bunting's Boys soon began laying in wait for protest marchers, first to block their path and later to knock heads. Over New Year's, they bird-dogged a line of student demonstrators on a four-day, 75-mile protest walk from Belfast to Londonderry. On the final day, they ambushed the students, who reached their goal with 81 injured. That night, Londonderry's police-many of them Paisley sympathizers-staged a raid on Bogside, the Catholic slum area. They beat passersby, smashed windows and shouted into darkened houses, "Come...