Word: hume
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...solution, Hume's party believes, must be a sharing of the executive power in a new Northern Ireland government, with Catholics and Protestants represented in proportion to their numbers. Voting rights must be based on universal suffrage and one man, one vote (before the fall of the Unionist government at Stormont, certain Protestants had dual vote privileges); Protestants cannot continue to dominate the legislature through contrived voting districts, gerrymandered to favor their election. The party recognizes that many Ulster Protestants fear Catholic republicanism most of all--that in a united Ireland, the Catholic majority would dominate the Protestants, attempting...
...Hume speaks of his country with quiet, serious intensity and becomes even more subdued when he describes daily life in Ulster today. Hume says he finds that Americans generally have trouble conceiving "what a small, well-organized group of people can do to immobilize a community when they practice urban guerrilla warfare...
...Hume describes a feud based on random, vendetta killings. "Many, many innocent people have been killed," he says. "There's a tit-for-tat campaign of sectarian murder, where randomly chosen Catholics and Protestants are killed by the violent groups, simply because of their religion and for no other reason at all." One day the IRA kills a Protestant, Hume says, and the next day the Ulster Defence Association retaliates and kills a Catholic...
Since 1969, when violence broke out in response to a developing Catholic civil rights movement, more than 5000 bombs have exploded. More than 1600 people have been killed. Hume is fond of pointing out that, in a province with a population the size of Connecticut's, these deaths would be the equivalent of 200,000 American deaths--four times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam...
People who live in one of the cities of Ulster cannot escape the tension and constant fear of random violence, Hume says. Londonderry remains a city under military occupation. Instead of night-stick toting policemen patrolling the streets, British soldiers with automatic rifles are always visible. Soldiers stop shoppers as they pass through check-points throughout the city, searching their bags and parcels for bombs and weapons; people are accustomed to running wildly from a store after a bomb threat is announced...