Word: stormont
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...British government will doubtless interpret the results as a vindication of its present policies. Almost immediately, it is expected to release its long-promised White Paper defining the future political status of Northern Ireland. The document reportedly will not call for a restoration of Ulster's Protestant-dominated Stormont Parliament, which was suspended a year ago. Instead, it will most likely create committees with responsibility for various sections of government; committee chairmanships will be carefully apportioned between Protestants and Catholics. The Special Powers Act, under which several hundred Catholics have been detained without trial, will be ended immediately...
...long time, the I.R.A. was winning. By 1972 it had bombed the Protestant Unionist Government at Stormont out of existence. Indeed, only seven months ago, the Proves were still, in the words of one Ulster politician, "on the pig's back." They, more than any other group, held the key to peace or war. Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, was dealing with them as a major power, flying them to London in an R.A.F. plane for secret political talks. MacStiofain even got the British to release an internee from prison camp to join the I.R.A...
...whether a common mistrust of Britain might not eventually unite Ulstermen. In fact, there is already more contact between Protestant and Catholic politicians, even the extremists, than meets the eye. Among those advocating joint exploration of a "negotiated" independence from Britain is John Taylor, onetime Home Minister in the Stormont Cabinet. Taylor was the target of a machine-gun attack by an l.R.A. faction last year. Although still a hard-fisted Unionist, he has recently made discreet approaches to Northern republicans and now enjoys a vogue among Dublin editorialists. Still, the idea of independence, with its implication of British troop...
...guidelines to its own thinking on what provisions a new Ulster constitution might contain. Westminster strongly favors some form of regional assembly in Belfast; it does not approve of a revamped provincial Parliament dominated by a Cabinet-such as the one through which the Protestants ruled Northern Ireland from Stormont. And Britain does not want the full integration of Ulster into the United Kingdom in the manner of Scotland and Wales. A regional assembly could be modeled along the lines of the Greater London Council, with various assembly committees-some headed by Catholics-administering the province's financial, social...
Embarking on what he privately admitted was a "frightening gamble," Whitelaw set up offices in gargoyled Stormont Castle, and held an exhaustive series of meetings with everyone from Unionist politicians to Catholic housewives whose admiration for the I.R.A. was diminishing under the endless violence. Visitors reported that the Scots-born Whitelaw had at least one Irish trait, "the gift of the gab." He proved it two weeks ago by persuading a party of masked Protestant vigilantes to unmask and be comfortable in his office...