Word: stormont
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...united Ireland wholly free of British control. The army's tactics of terror have succeeded in reopening the issue of "the border," and the reunification of North and South?Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. They have made all but untenable the Protestant-dominated government of Northern Ireland at Stormont. They have caused England's Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath and his Cabinet to wonder if it is worth keeping Ulster after all, notwithstanding official avowals to do so. To many observers, in short, the real issue is not so much whether an Ulster tied to Britain can survive...
...hats. Many of them refused to lay down arms even after partition in 1921. This established the Irish Free State in the South, and in the North left six counties of Ulster predominantly Protestant (see map) as an integral part of the United Kingdom, with its own Parliament at Stormont. First the gunmen fought against the Black and Tans, the hated English force that policed the last vestige of British rule in the early '20s, an era immortalized in John Ford's classic film The Informer...
...Irish Free State a republic and took it out of the Commonwealth. Britain's Parliament promptly passed the Ireland Act, which has ever since been the mainstay of Protestant determination to maintain the ties with London. Under the act, Ulster remains a British province with its own Parliament, until Stormont chooses to unite the six counties with those of the South?which, of course, it defiantly chooses...
...army has always had a phoenixlike ability to rise from the ashes of defeat, and 1968 gave it another lease on life. In that year, Ulster's Catholics, with the support of liberal Protestants, began their civil rights demonstrations for better homes, jobs and an equitable voice in the Stormont government. The protests turned into bloody riots. Mobs of Protestants marched through the Catholic ghettos of Londonderry and Belfast, burning and beating, while the Royal Ulster Constabulary and dreaded Protestant "B special" police auxiliary forces either participated or looked the other way. The riots and their aftermath brought Firebrand Reformer...
...army boasts that popular support for its methods and goals remains strong among the Northern Catholics. Austin Currie, an opposition M.P. in the Stormont Parliament, agrees: "Because of internment, there is more support for the violent men than ever before in my experience." Very little of that sympathy comes from the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which three decades ago threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who joined the army. In his Christmas message, for instance, Bishop William McFeely of Raphoe condemned "the callous men who are now prepared to plunge this whole county into anarchy and strife. We must...