Word: belfasts
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Sallow and sharp-featured, his unkempt hair a veil that flops down to hide the anguished confusion that haunts his eyes, Lynch's Cal is superficially a Belfast archetype. He is an unemployed adolescent from a broken home, trying to draw a curtain of rock music between himself and the terror-ridden streets, where glibly impassioned rhetoric is punctuated by the sound of explosions. Still, there is time on his hands and an emotional need to fill, so he drifts, convictionless, into the I.R.A.'s orbit, driving getaway cars for their "revolutionary" crimes. One of these forays results...
...first the project seemed to herald Northern Ireland's economic revitalization. In 1978 the British government agreed to help finance John Z. De Lorean's West Belfast car factory, which eventually provided 2,600 jobs at a time when 35% of the city's male workers were unemployed. But after four years the company went bankrupt, and De Lorean was later arrested on charges of trafficking in cocaine. Last week a British parliamentary committee issued a scathing 328-page report that attacks his misappropriation of public funds...
...British government is learning to beware of Americans bearing jobs. First, John De Lorean's sports-car venture went bankrupt in 1982, taking with it 2,600 Belfast jobs and $156 million in British financing. Now, development of the Lear Fan 2100 turboprop corporate plane has stalled, after burning up as much as $80 million in British aid. More than 90% of the 365 workers at the main Lear plant near Belfast got the news last week that they would be laid off July 1. Reason: the developers are low on cash and more than a year behind schedule...
...Lear's death in 1978, his widow Moya tried to finish the plane, but financial troubles forced her to give up control to a group of investors led by Denver Oilman Bob Burch. He expects an FAA go-ahead by February and hopes to rehire the workers. But Belfast is bedeviled by doubts about whether the Lear Fan will ever be airborne...
...islanders picked up the name, which they now use more often than the time-honored "Kelpers" (after the seaweed that they once harvested). Locals, in turn, call the British soldiers "Whennies" because of their tendency to go on at boring length about the time "when I was in Belfast" or "when I was on Cyprus." Although occasional fistfights break out on Saturday nights in Port Stanley's pubs, an officer notes that "relations with the local population are a lot worse in some British towns I can think...