ULSTER VIOLENCE Govt welcomes Wilson’s move

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32778, 1 December 1971, Page 17

ULSTER VIOLENCE Govt welcomes Wilson’s move

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, November 30. The British Government has welcomed the initiative of the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Harold Wilson) on Northern Ireland, and has expressed willingness to join inter-party talks in London and in both parts of Ireland aimed at solving the province’s troubles.

During a House of Commons debate yesterday, the Home Secretary (Mr Reginald Maudling) said: “The proposals by the Leader of the Opposition are accepted in the spirit in which they were put forward. All solutions, from whatever quarter they might come, must be examined fully, honestly and sincerely.” But Mr Maudling questioned the realism behind Mr Wilson’s long-term plan for a united Ireland within the Commonwealth. It was very difficult, in present circumstances, he said to imagine the majority of the Northern Irish people, who were Protestants, voting to go into a united Ireland.

Mr Maudling also doubted whether, in practice, the Roman Catholic Irish Republic would accept Queen Elizabeth as Head of the Commonwealth, or accept other proposals for internal reform. Mr Maudling again set out the British Government’s three basic conditions for a solution:

It must not come by violence but by consent. Northern Ireland would re-

main part of the United Kingdom unless and until her Parliament md people decided otherwise.

British troops must be available in support of the civil power in Northern Ireland for as long as they were needed, just as they would be in any other part of the United Kingdom. BODY FOUND

Ulster detectives today sought the help of their counterparts in the republic after the body of a young man had been found by two youths on a lonely road near the border last night. A police spokesman in Belfast said that the man may have been killed in the republic and dragged across the border.

“We are treating this as a case of murder," he added. “We are trying to determine whether it was a political assassination.”

Security forces in Ulster have had a relatively quiet night, only one bomb explosion being recorded, at the municipal library in Londonderry. In Belfast, an Army patrol raided a house in a Roman Catholic area of the city and found a Sten gun, three loaded magazines, nine nail bombs, 28 detonators, more than 200 rounds of ammunition, fuses, and 201 b of plastic explosives. Six men were arrested.