TWO VIEWS OF THE CONFLICT IN IRELAND

Violence and the Orange Mafia
I AM just back from a visit 2to Ireland—an unprofessional visit, to relax and meet friends. I travelled through Dublin because I cherish even a glimpse of the city.
We do not, I feel, see Ireland as it is—on the whole a gentle nation. The men fulfil their impulse to violence on the rugby, Gaelic football and .hurley fields, at sport, or roaring on the sidelines. The women innocently flirt, raise families or, victims of the family, tend the aged bequeathed to them.
It is absurd to speak of uniting Irishmen when in the Republic divorce and birth control are unlawful and State censorship exists. Presbyterians, a stable group in most societies, do not consider marriage a sacrament: to them it is a contract.
Their honest belief does not make them less faithful husbands, fathers, wives, mothers than other Irish folk. In the Republic their freedom, as Presbyterians, is unrecognised.
But Catholic men and women are fighting against the anomalies and Cardinal Conway has said that the Constitution is not sacrosant.
The general attitude, as I found it, to the killings was expressed by a relaxed and fit patriarch of 70 who has 25 grandchildren. I discussed with him a murder to which I reacted in a personal way. It happened Iike this.
In Strabane a 20-year-old policeman was shot dead. He was a native of the Moy. My father was a native of the Moy and his sons and daughters spent their annual school holidays there. It was uniquely beautiful, an Irish village built upon an Italian plan by a Lord Charlemont.
Around the piazza, great chestnut trees were planted : there was a water-pump operated by a big wheel on which we perilously swung, making revolutions on our tummies.
"At the end of the town" the River Blackwater separated the May from the sister village of Charlement and we boys and girls played in the meadows which rolled back from the river banks toward the Catholic Church.
Some of us were Catholic, some Protestant. I do not recall that it mattered. So when that lad was shot I wondered if his father had been a boy with whom 1 played. I grieved and damned the moral cretin who pulled the trigger.
I mentioned this to my friend, the patriarch. He said: "God rest the boy! What can one say? Y'know over here when the young men go shooting, I tell them—never shoot a sitting 'pheasant. That's slaughter. Over there, they shoot sitting human beings. God knows what possesses them. I don't."
A few days later. over a drink, another friend asked the patriarch how many big "bags" he had brought home recently. He looked embarrassed, then confessed: "None. Y'see a few years back I began to rear •pheasants."
He stopped and laughed. "Before you know where I was I began to like the creatures so much I can't shoot them any more."
He voiced, I believe, a common spirit in the Irish Republic, where I saw four-year-old infant girls dancing with their fathers while the band played and where children happily swarm. They reverence life there. Children perpetuate life, and the alternative to life is death. But that is just part of the story, "How can we," the patriarch said, "but feel resentful when over there our people are being repressed in the way the Afrikaner represses the African?
"Y'know the Afrikaner is a bit like the Orangeman. He cannot be moved: he is not open to reason. There is no point in all the world telling the Orangeman that Mr. Hume is a decent responsible man, or that young Currie would be an asset to any democratic assembly.
"They are Catholics, and to the Orangemen that makes them enemies of the State. Politically speaking—and this goes for Protestants too—anyone in the Six Counties who is not an Orangeman is suspect.
"You tell me Gerry Fitt is respected in London as a man of integrity, an honest man, and 1 believe you. But be careful where you say it in the Six Counties where the Orangemen will tell you he is a Sinn Fein
Papist Bolshevik bastard..
"That is poisonous: the roots of the trouble ooze poisonous Orange hatred. It is infectious. 'there can be no Catholic representation in a province where every nonUnionist is smeared before be opens his mouth."
The basis of this reasoned distrust—the record proves it —is that the Orange Order, from its beginnings, has been an Orange Mafia, controlling politics, jobs and housing.
It was the first group to introduce arms to Ireland—arms to he used against a British Government. The improvement on the legislative record. the Catholic minority believe, will not be made effective.
"How can we believe them?" I was asked, "when the men responsible for the new legislation, Terence O'Neill and Major Chichester Clarke, were politically liquidated—yes, I mean liquidated—before they could put the new laws into operation."
The Republic is thus divided. Violence repels it. But those who control the Six Counties created and have maintained, in a grossly blundering way, the context for violence. Catholic homes have been burned. Catholic children killed.
Without evidence, every crime is blamed on the I.R.A. Without evidence, the Republic is accused of giving sanctuary to the killers. The Loyalits (loyal to what?) have amassed arms: gun clubs are permitted : only Protestants are members.
Internment was directed against the minority : no member of a Protestant organisation was arrested: by far the majority interned are innocent or ineffectual men. None has been charged in open court.
There is evidence they have been brutally treated. Since that unjust, ill-advised and inefficient (in application) step was taken the murder-roll has lengthened.
And yet no one, apart from a •handful of' Provisional I.R.A. lunatics, supported by a dotage of trendy "intellectuals", and the Ulster Volunteer Force, with its itchy trigger fingers, wants civil war. The old (and true) I.R.A. has denounced violence. Sympathetically watched,
Mr. Lynch treads precariously and sagely : his majority is small, his Government weakened by breakaway Border fetishists who appear to belieye that the casual absorption of two million hostile or reluctant Protestants will make Ireland what it already is, a nation once again, and something of a Utopia.
Joe Cahill speaks of "freedom": what he means by the word he does not bother to define. Miss Bernadette Devlin, the pigmy Pasionaria of Cookstown, tells "Ted Heath" to give the Six Counties "back to the workers."
One wonders what they would do with it. Make it a colder Cuba, dependent for doles upon the U.S.S.R. with the boys and girls dancing the gupak at the cross-roads?
There are good men in the Six Counties and good men in the Republic. The Churches are united against violence. While Derry and Belfast burned and. exploded during the fourth week in September, the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce discussed methods of economic co-operation between North and South.
The people of the North throng the Republic's hotels where no questions on religion and politics are asked, where all sympathise.
In the core of political responsibility Mr. Reginald Maudling operates, or should 'be operating. Grave responsibilities are his. It might inspire confidence if he showed an occasional sign of being aware of his responsibility. But the "image" is boredom.
Mr. James Callaghan is remembered because he sincerely sympathised and took action that, given informed and sustained support, might have cleared the mess.
The people of the Republic are politically sophisticated. Among other questions they are asking is a $64,000 question. Do Mr. Heath and his Government propose entering Europe with the albatross of "Ulster" hanging on their collective neck. or trailing its entrails behind them?
W. J. Igoe