Stormont opposition plan for 'private' police force

FROM A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN BELFAST UNIONISM as a political philosophy has reached the end of the road, in the words of the Irish Prime Minister Jack Lynch in London this week. To help confirm it, the main opposition, the Social Democrat Labour Party, continues to boycott Stormont.
'Their alternative "Assembly of the Northern Irish People" has now taken a further step to underline the breakdown of law and order. Pending a "political solution" they plan to set up their own police force in the "no-go" areas of Ulster like the Catholic Bogside in Derry and parts of Belfast— where no R.U.C. man, with or without an Army guard dares to set foot at the peril of his life.
A public general-purposes fund is to be set up next week to get the new unarmed police force off the ground. Members may wear uniforms and some will operate on a fulltime basis. They will have their own courts and prisons so that "justice will be seen to be done," as Austin Currie puts it.
It looks like a challenge, on the face of it, to the I.R.A.'s Kangaroo Courts, which mete out sentences of tar-andfeathering and even death.
PEACE-KEEPING The aims of the new police force arc, however, a peacekeeping community role and to deal with summary offences like looting, thefts and assault. There are conceivable limits, however, and one wonders, for example about how murder cases could possibly be handled.
The Stormont Government pooh-pooh's the whole idea as impracticable, claiming they have everything under control. Unionists like Mr. John Laird see it as an "ideal cover for the I.R.A. Ghetto Gestapo."
The S.D.L.P. wants no parley with men of violence, but it is ready and willing to talk to Republicans and the new Democratic Unionist Party, the erstwhile Protestant Unionist Party formed by Rev. Ian Paisley and Mr. Desmond Boal.
Strange noises have been emanating from this opposition group, which finds common ground with the S.D.L.P. and even Republicans in many respects.
They are out to overthrow the Faulkner Government. They are against internment without trial and evince a social streak even to the point of nationalisation — for example of the Lough Neagh Eel Fisheries foreign combine.
FAVOURABLE They are also opposed to direct links between their party and the Orange Order, even if this is only to be consistent with their call that Church and State in the Catholic Republic of Ireland should be constitutionally separate.
While Mr. Paisley continues behind the scenes to lash the Catholic hierarchy with all his old venom, he also publicly proclaims "Protestants and Roman Catholics have together to fight the battle for life. They have common hardships, common sorrows, common sicknesses, and common family distresses."
Paisley knows, of course, he has the Protestant extremist vote in his pocket, and he now seems to be trying to woo the traditional Unionist vote by toning down his message with more outward-looking expressions.
Even Irish unity is no longer unmentionable. His theme is "change the sectarian constitution in the South, and maybe Northern Protestants will start taking a new and more favourable view of the prospect of a United Ireland."
All of which must be straining the loyalties of: his "follow unto death" Papist-hating supporters.
MASTERMIND
The brilliantly astute and legalistic Mr. Boat appears to be masterminding the strategy of the new Democratic Unionist Party. He is not, he says, by any means anti-Catholic. Part of his education was at Trinity College, Dublin and he is a regular cross-border traveller with a confessed weakness for the sport of kings.
He seems in fact overaesthetic to be M.P. for such a widely Protestant constituency as Shankill. It must have come as a shock to many of them to learn for the first time that there is an ex-monk in their midst — and none other than Mr. Boal himself.
The contemplative life drew him three years ago to the Buddhist temple in West Thailand. Indeed it is not cornmonly known that over the past 15 years he conducted a series of "safaris" to the Far East Of his life in the Buddhist temple for eight weeks he said in a recent interview; "there were 15 or 16 monks and an abbot in the temple. f had my head shaved and 1 wore their garb. I got up at five in the morning, walked with the others to the nearest village, carrying a basket on my back.
"The villagers poured in rice as their gifts and we returned to the monastery to (continued on back page)