World: TWO FLAGS OVER ULSTER

IN an extraordinary historical reversal, British soldiers last week were deployed for the purpose of keeping Irishmen from each other’s throats. Some 6,500 strong, they were assigned their pacific role in Northern Ireland, whose two largest cities, Belfast and Londonderry, were still smoking after four nights of sectarian rioting between Protestants and Catholics.

In the latest manifestation of a bitter heritage of hatred that dates back nearly three centuries, eight Ulstermen lay dead and nearly 800 (including 226 policemen) were injured. Side streets along Falls Road, the principal thoroughfare in Belfast’s Catholic section, were blocked by barricades of double-decker buses. British troops strung concertina wire down Crumlin Road, Belfast’s religious Mason-Dixon line. To one side fluttered the Union Jack of the loyalist Protestants, and to the other, the tricolor of the Irish Republic had been briefly flown. The flags were apt symbols of the passions that divide Northern Ireland’s two contending groups: the 1,000,000 Protestants, who fear eventual absorption by the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic to the south, and the 500,000 Catholics, who have been shortchanged in housing, education, employment and voting rights ever since the six counties that make up Ulster were split off from the 26 counties of Eire in the 1921 partition.

Crumpling Under Pressure. While the cities smoldered, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister Major James Chichester-Clark and his two top ministers flew to London to confer with Prime Minister

Harold Wilson and his Cabinet. It was no secret that the British were irritated with Chichester-CIark for his handling of the situation. A compromise leader who defeated his nearest rival by a single vote in the Protestant Unionist Party’s balloting last May 1, Chichester-CIark had proved unable to stand up to pressure. When Protestant militants insisted that a group called the Apprentice Boys be allowed to march in Londonderry to commemorate the lifting of the siege by King James II’s Catholic army in 1689, he gave in, despite warnings that riots might ensue.

During six hours of talks at No. 10 Downing Street, Chichester-CIark found himself under pressure once again. Under Wilson’s arm twisting, he crumpled. He transferred command of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s 350-man riot squad and of the auxiliary police, known as “B Specials,” from the Ulster government to Lieut. General Sir Ian Freeland, 57, the much-decorated British commander in Northern Ireland. Chichester-CIark consented to what amounts to the disarming of the B Specials, who used to keep their weapons at home but henceforth will be required to place them under central control.

Additionally, an investigation into the composition of the regular and B Special police would be headed by Lord John Hunt, leader of the mountain-climbing team that first scaled Mt. Everest. Other British aides will set up shop in the office of the Ulster Minister of Home Affairs and in Chichester-Clark’s own office. To Northern Ireland’s Catholics, the all-Protestant

B Special force is an object of particular fear and hatred. The Royal Ulster Constabulary consists of 3,000 men, who are on full-time duty, and 8,400 Class B Specials, who serve part-time in emergencies such as the present one and have been blamed for most of the casualties. Two other branches of the Special Constabulary, Class A and Class C, have lapsed. To Ulster Catholics, the B Specials are nothing more than armed hooligans. To such militant Protestants as the Rev. Ian Paisley, an anti-Catholic fanatic, they are “the teeth” of Ulster’s defense.

Firmly in Command. Though Chichester-Clark denied that the arrangements implied any diminution of his government’s power, it was obvious that the British were in command and that the Catholics had won a major battle. Almost immediately, Protestant hard-liners began demanding the Prime Minister’s resignation and raised a howl about the disarming of the B Specials. They complained that they would be left defenseless in the face of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, whose spokesmen were boasting of having sent “a number of fully equipped units to the aid of their comrades in the six counties.” Though the I.R.A. is rich in song and legend, the fact is that it has little contemporary muscle. Poorly armed, undermanned (membership estimates go no higher than a few hundred), it has limited its recent activities to firing random shots at visiting British warships or setting up roadblocks to mar a tour by Britain’s Princess Margaret.

The Protestant militants might do better to concern themselves with last week’s visit to the U.S. by 22-year-old Bernadette Devlin, who was elected to the British Parliament from Ulster last spring as a staunch fighter for Catholic rights. While the I.R.A. was doing little more than talking, Bernadette flew to New York to begin raising $1,000,000 for her constituents back home.

At week’s end, with stability largely restored by the British troops, the moderates on both sides seemed to be asserting themselves. Ulster Catholics, vastly encouraged by the promises of broader civil rights and the disarming of the B Specials, reportedly refused to stir up trouble by cooperating with I.R.A. emissaries. A Protestant member of Northern Ireland’s Parliament, Dick Ferguson, resigned from the Orange Order, a Protestant organization that virtually runs Ulster. “Now is the time,” said Ferguson, “for all people in Northern Ireland to try to come together.” Strangely enough, the English seemed on the way to bringing peace to Irishmen.