by Duncan James
***
Suddenly, the news media was taking an interest in Northern Ireland again. The New York Times had sent a man across specially, the first time they’d had a correspondent based in Belfast for almost three years.
The disappearance of Martin McFosters had stirred the imagination, and had stirred the Real IRA into accusing the Unionists of having abducted him, although they had not been able to suggest why they should have done so. In Northern Ireland, details like that rarely mattered. The police had also been active, and were showing off the results of several successful raids on illegally held arms. Several IRA and Sinn Fein members had been arrested at the same time. The Police had said they had been “acting on information received”, and the nationalist population naturally believed that it was Unionists within the NI Police Service who were to blame.
Within days, two prominent Unionists were assassinated on the same night, one a leading politician, the other the Commander of the Belfast ‘Brigade’ of the Ulster Defence Force. Forensic tests showed that, in at least one case, the gun had been used before in other loyalist murders, presumably by the IRA. Almost immediately, the police were able to put on show more weapons, this time seized from two of the unionist paramilitary organisations. By now, they had taken quite a haul of guns and ammunition out of circulation, to the delight of the local population and Westminster. The Chairman of the De-Commissioning Body was forced to admit that the police had suddenly been able to put more terrorist weapons beyond further use, in a matter of days, than they had been able to in years.
Ballistic tests soon proved that the Commanders of the Londonderry and Belfast Brigades of the IRA had both been killed by weapons previously used by members of the UVF some years before. The murderers who had used them then had recently been released early from prison under the amnesty.
By now, tensions were running high, and the Army had twice been called in to support the police in containing angry confrontations along the sectarian divide. The police, with Army support, had mounted successful raids on two major arms dumps, one Nationalist and the other Unionist. There were more sectarian murders, with high-ranking casualties on both sides, although neither side really understood what was going on. Both suddenly realised that they were being quietly and efficiently disarmed, and that their leadership was being whittled away. Certainly, it was the police, with Army help, who were somehow finding arms dumps, even quite small ones, and stripping them bare. But neither side nor the public believed the police could be responsible for the seemingly systematic assassination of the top terrorists - that had to be tit-for-tat, like the bad old days.
If anything, the IRA leadership, or what there was left of it, was less worried than the Unionist Para-militaries. For a start, they had much more of everything, and had a new, very large consignment of weaponry on the way. They had also, to avoid further arrests as much as anything, organised the collection of as much as they could of the arms and ammunition being held in private houses and drinking clubs. They were understandably furious when the removal van was stopped on the border, the driver and his mate arrested, and the whole lot, carefully hidden though it was in crates, wardrobes, mattresses, fridges and other items of household furniture, taken away before it got anywhere near Cashel.
