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The Chroniclers of Violence in Northern Ireland: A Tragedy in Endless Acts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

J. Bowyer Bell
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Extract

Remorselessly, and apparently inevitably, as 1976 ticks away, the death toll in the tangled Irish Troubles creeps higher, faster this year than any time since 1972—the vintage year for blood and turmoil. Except for the threatened, no one any longer seems greatly to care. Murder must be peculiarly grisly or quite spectacular to warrant more than cursory coverage in any but Irish journals. The dramatic detonation of a mine under the British ambassador's Jaguar outside Dublin in July engendered, briefly, media interest. Ambassadors are not assassinated every day, but in Ulster ordinary people are—or nearly every day. There have been too many nowarning bombs in pubs to remember, too many sprawled bodies discovered by pedestrians to concern any but the devastated relatives. The Provisional IRA's self-imposed truce has eroded and again there are bombs in Belfast, land mines in South Armagh, snipers in Derry. The British army and especially the Ulster police have become prime targets. Yet the Republicans feud among themselves. The Loyalist paramilitaries still pursue a strategy of random assassination and thus have unleashed a vicious, seemingly irreversible, cycle of tit-for-tat murders. Politicians, warders, judges are targets of assassins of various faiths. And the violence has been exported. There are bombs in Manchester and Birmingham, assassins in Kensington and gunmen firing into restaurants in London's West End, explosions in the underground, firebombs in the shops. The Loyalist paramilitaries have carried their war into the Irish Republic with explosions in crowded streets. The elegant Gresham and Shelbourne hotels have been bombed in Dublin and lesser resort establishments hit elsewhere. The greatest single slaughter, twenty-six people killed, came in a Dublin street, not in Belfast or Derry. No one sees an end. Even the hope that mutual exhaustion might bring an end to violence has flickered out.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , October 1976 , pp. 510 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1976

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References

1 Irish Microforms Ltd., 35 Kildare Street, Dublin 2.

2 One of the more arcane reference works to appear is The Last Post, The Details and Stories of the Republican Dead, 1913/1975 by the National Graves Association (Dublin, 1976)Google Scholar an updating of the first 1932 edition. For the specialist the inclusions andexclusions are intriguing; but for others the exercise does, indeed, have a significant import for Irish Republicans. They serve without uniform, pension prospects, or great hope of temporal recognition —thus next to the ballads those who lose in the patriot game can be assured their sacrifice, if in vain, will yet not be forgotten.

3 Blackstaff Press, Ltd., 16 Donegall Square, Belfast.

4 Hibernia, 206 Pearse Street, Dublin 2.

5 Fortnight, 7 Lower Crescent, Belfast.

6 There is a clue in that a Van Voris, Jacqueline published Constance de Markievicz: In the Cause of Ireland with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1967Google Scholar.

7 Cf. Cooney, John and Cooney, Lenore (prose), Skoogfors, Leif (photographs), The Most Natural Thing in the World (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974)Google Scholar; and Doyle, Colman, People at War (Dublin: F.D.R., 1975)Google Scholar.

8 It must be noted that the suggestion to introduce sectarian schools has been a cherished formula for some time but considered by the pragmatic as a nonstarter for the immediate future. Dr. William Philbin, Roman Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, has announced that he would refuse to confirm children who went to state or Protestant-dominated schools. Msgr. Patrick Joseph Mullally, chairman of the Down and Connor Maintained Schools Committee, which covers the Belfast area, insisted the proposal is “as phony an issue as you will ever encounter. The issues here are housing and employment, not schools, and there's no evidence at all that education is part of the trouble here” (New York Times, 5 August 1976). Although the response, confirming Protestant prejudice and revealing the charming parochialism of the Irish Church, was less than felicitous, Mullally is largely correct in assessing thepaucity of evidence that indicates separate schooling produces bigots (some of Richard Rose's data, albeit limited, suggest that familiarity does not breed toleration). The concept of secular, unified schools is a touchstone for many liberal, democratic Americans, but in Ireland it is a contentious concept, guaranteed to engender further passion. As always in Northern Ireland, well-meant and perhaps even valid prescriptions fall on fallow and bitter ground.

9 Cf. McAllister, Ian, The 1975 Northern Ireland Convention Election (Glasgow: University of Strothclyde, Survey Research Center, Occasional Paper Number 14, 1976)Google Scholar.