Word: ulstermen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...agony of Northern Ireland is generally dated from the sectarian riots of August 1969, when 300 British troops were airlifted in to restore order. Since then, by British army estimate, there have been 2,200 bomb explosions, an average of more than two a day, and 541 deaths. Ulstermen have had to accustom themselves to the surrealistic world of urban guerrilla warfare; violence has become almost as common as shepherd's pie, and assassination squads move through Belfast with ease. TIME Correspondent William Rademaekers cabled these impressions of a city that has in many ways become accustomed to horror...
...size of Britain's entire NATO force. Armored Saracen and Saladin vehicles, still painted the color of sand for desert duty, were landed by Royal Navy vessels. On the eve of the operation, Whitelaw warned the populace that "substantial activity by the security forces" was imminent, and advised Ulstermen to stay off the streets. At 4 o'clock the next morning, as a drizzling rain fell, the first armored columns broke into Londonderry's Bogside and Creggan districts-which were known to Catholics as "Free Derry." Residents peered from behind blinds as troops with their faces blackened...
...Provo commander in the Belfast area, insisted that the I.R.A. had given the British army plenty of warning before the Bloody Friday bombings. But one seemingly disillusioned Provo sympathizer retorted that the army could not possibly have coped with so many bomb warnings in a single afternoon. Many Ulstermen believed that Twomey's motive in ordering the bombing attack, which killed nine and wounded 130, had been to prevent his Dublin-based superiors from putting out any more peace feelers...
...injured. The Catholics blamed the bombing on Protestant extremists; the British army concluded that it might have been caused by I.R.A. explosives that went off by accident. In a sense it did not really matter. The important fact was that after two months of direct rule from London, the Ulstermen were as close to anarchy as ever...
...sporadic; and there were no buses, trains or mail deliveries. At one point "tartan gangs" of Protestant youths roamed through Belfast's streets, shouting curses in Catholic neighborhoods and in one case partially destroying a parochial school. The Protestant violence ended as abruptly as the strike itself, and Ulstermen returned to work next...