Word: sectarianism
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Interestingly, as this nascent political partnership matured, the Protestant Jerusalem that was once the epicenter of sectarian strife has become, almost silently, Catholic turf. With the exception of a single neighborhood, called the Fountain, the old walled city of Derry today is almost exclusively populated by families who would have been excluded ten years ago. The change is hardly a tribute to any growing spirit of tolerance, however, since a prime reason most Protestants left was to seek more modern housing in the newly developed?and heavily Protestant?district of Waterside...
...extraordinary invasion signified the onset of Ulster's "marching season," when the war-weary province's Catholics and Protestants celebrate-separately and often violently-past sectarian milestones. This week Protestants will don their orange sashes to parade through Belfast in honor of William of Orange's victory over England's last Catholic monarch, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Four weeks later, their opponents will parade in doleful memory of "Internment Day," the anniversary of a 1971 British military roundup where hundreds of Catholics were jailed without trials...
...meaning of the election can be summed up as a series of paradoxes. One, there can be no alternation in power, of the kind that exists in the U.S., in Britain or in West Germany, as long as the French C.P. pursues so sectarian a strategy as to keep a majority of the French from voting for a Left-wing coalition. Unlike the Italian C.P., the French one continues to put the preservation of its own integrity--its electoral base and its hostility to any reformism it could not control--ahead of everything else. It even discards the opportunities...
...upshot of this has been an agonizing political impasse and motionlessness. The political parties which have garnered substantial electoral support--the Social Democratic Labor Party, the moderate and major Catholic party; the Alliance Party, a non-sectarian party; and the Unionists--all still retain local and parliamentary influence. But in terms of their ability to influence the direction of the whole province, they are jockeying in thin air. Only the Alliance Party, which stresses reconciliation and espouses both the link with Britain and Catholic civil rights, gives indications that it might one day unite enough moderate Catholic and Protestant support...
...imply that they question at all the link with Britain. In the Catholic communities, the army has already discredited the law which it was sent to uphold and undermined the pronouncements of the government. In both communities, the authority of the government's direct rule is secondary to the sectarian objectives of the two groups, and is (or will be) attacked when it is seen to stifle those aspirations...