THE CATHOLICS in Northern Ireland have suffered for many years and still suffer under a jackboot of Loyalist and Unionist tyranny until law and order become a mockery; the whole process is so biassed and riddled with one sided applications that over 100,000 Catholics are now voting against it in disgust and the other 100,000 voters share their views.
The prisons are filled with young Catholics, while few loyalists, equal perpetrators of violence, are In prison.
Until this prison population of young men and women is drastically lessened there will be an increasing volume of support for Sinn Fein.
The people, especially the young Catholics, have come to expect no understanding from the authorities, indeed no understanding from many of their own leaders; they see them as remote and as "jugglers of words" rather than the blunt truthful persons they want to speak for them against the paper wall constructed by Britain around the Six Counties of North East Ireland — Our country not yours as the readers of the 'Catholic Herald' may now be realising As in all struggles for freedom, one type of tyranny is usually replaced by another and the poor and oppressed usually remain poor and oppressed. In east and south Tyrone, after the recent election threats wereuttered by supporters of the Sinn Fein candidate (20,000 votes) against supporters of the SDLP candidate (10,000)
because the Unionist candidate (28,000) won, several nights of broken glass followed when the houses of of SDLP workers had their windows broken.
One teacher, a former pupil of mine, collected 20 bricks from his living room floor, lucky that his three little girls of 6, 4 and 2 were not sitting there. He fixed the windows. Two nights later they were broken again.
Elsewhere cars were burnt, and caravans and business premises were vandalised. The Sinn Fein policy emerged loud and clear as the same as the Loyalist policy, "Do as we say or get plugged".
Justice is not enough: politics are inadequate to solve the problems of society. Justice and politics only deal with the satisfaction of human greed. Christianity should supersede or elevate the political process to be compassionate and forgiving, tolerant and unselfish, to serve rather than dominate, to give rather than to grab.
A pity our democracies do not attempt to measure up to ordinary Christianity; but why should they when so few of our leading professional Churchmen measure up to them!
Even death by murder does not satisfy the modern politicians. Whether bodies are left on the bottom of a great ocean or a lake in Northern Ireland, it worries politicians little that the relatives have no corpse to mourn or to bury decently.