mal. marches.
thugs this year.
At Shorts aircraft factory, a tarian employer, Loyalist walk-out. Housing THE LOYALIST campaign of terror following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Accord took a new twist at the beginning of this week. Alan Wright of the Ulster Clubs announced that the homes of 'collaborators' will be picketed. Orange Order grand master Alan Smyth, who is also Official Unionist MP for South Belfast, described the latest loyalist threat as 'a normal method of the democratic process'. That it certainly is not! Whichever way you look at it, waking up each day to the visage of the Reverend lan Paisley or one of his thugs learing over your „cornflakes bowl cannot be described as norThe 12 July period of Orange marches was seen this year as a test of the Hillsborough Accord. Despite public statements to the contrary, the RUC climbed down in the face of these loyalist marches — and that is becoming more and more widely recognised. In Portadown loyalists achiered their objective of intimidating the nationalist population, when 20 homes were attacked. The same pattern was repeated throughout the North. In all, there were 1700 other provocative Orange There are no figures of the total number of Caiholies attacked and driven from their homes.
But over the summer period these sectarian killings have risen sharply. At the end of August Paddy McAlister, a taxi driver from the Falls Road, became the eighth murder victim of the loyalists notorious secCatholics have been publicly threatened and intimidated. Loyalist paramilitary slogans and badges proliferated on the shoptloor. Shorts management back down in the face of a officers on Shankhill Road have received threats demanding that Catholiles working there be removed. Lisburn had UVF death But alongside this step-up in Loyalist sectarian attacks there has also been a renewed offensive by the IRA, aimed at isolating the RUC. Devastating attacks on RUC barracks have meant that, despite wages reputed to be as high as f500 a week, loyalis contractors have refused to be helicoptered onto the sites to improve physical security there, and work has stopped as a result of the IRA campaign.
RUC morale is low and Paisley has taken the opportunity to call on them to resign rather than support the Accord and enforce 'Barry's law'.
All this has left the sole supporters of the Accord in the North, the SDLP, still more isolated John Hume, SDLP leader, is desperately trying to assure nationalists in the North that reforms will come this autumn as a result of the Anglo-Irish . But the growing instability of the situation since the Accord was signed means that nothing but cosmetic measures by the British government to scrap the UDF and Diploc courts, strip-searching have virtually disappeared.
will' is visibly evaporating. As far as the Thatcher government is concerned the 'reform" aspect of the displays of militarism by figleaf stripped John Hume, the search for a 'middle road' is being exposed as more nebulous than ever. As the autumn hopefully those in the British labour movement who believed the Accord could bring any sort of solution will see the disastrous error