Word: ulsterization
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...police headquarters at Newry, County Down, Superintendent Gerry French of the Royal Ulster Constabulary frets over the calm. Nothing unusual is going on outside in the bustling, mainly Catholic town. Pedestrians stroll. Shoppers head for McEvoy's Fashion Store close by. But even the commonplace may impart fear in Ulster, and French knows that appearances are deceptive. In February 1986, mortar shells launched by the Irish Republican Army thundered down on the police station, killing nine officers as they ate their evening meal. Since rebuilt, Newry station is now a fortress, protected by thick concrete walls...
...Belfast the nightmare began in the late 1960s, when the long political conflict involving pro-British Protestants and Catholic nationalists turned violent. The gun battles and bombings of the 1970s reduced whole blocks to rubble, and some neighborhoods became deadly "no-go" zones, where even Ulster police and British troops feared to enter. When at last the violence began to subside in 1982, Britain backed a major face-lift for the blighted city. Crumbling old slums and bomb sites were rebuilt as part of a $1.4 billion housing program for low-income districts...
...authorities have discovered that the same terrorist gangs that turned Belfast into a sectarian battleground have siphoned off millions of dollars from the reconstruction to finance their continuing war. As money for new construction pours into Belfast, paramilitary forces on both sides demand a cut of the profits. This Ulster Mafia exacts its levies from local businesses, and if people do not pay up, a bomb or a shot in the night may follow...
...Catholic side, factions of the Irish Republican Army and its offshoot the Irish National Liberation Army are leading the crime wave. Accused of taking in the money for the Protestants are members of the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force. In the interest of maximizing profits, warring Catholic and Protestant groups that cannot agree on much else have tacitly decided not to encroach on each other's territory. The I.R.A. and I.N.L.A. have the Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast to themselves, while the neighboring Shankill district and East Belfast are Protestant territory...
Paisley discusses only one side of the Northern Ireland situation. He contends that "democracy has ceased to exist since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985." The sad truth is that democracy has never existed in the province of Ulster. The Stormont government, prorogued in 1972, was the embodiment of a majority dictatorship, and as such officially tolerated and promoted various forms of discrimination, social and institutional, against the minority population. Gerrymandering, housing and job discrimination, police brutality and an incredibly repressive state-security apparatus were all consistent manifestations of the "democracy" whose passing Paisley laments. Perhaps he should follow...