Critical plan for Ulster

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32847, 22 February 1972, Page 17

Critical plan for Ulster

INI. Press Ann.— Copyright)

BELFAST, Feb. 21. Northern Ireland, still suffering acutely from terrorist bombings and gun battles, has embarked on a new and critical round in the struggle to end her three years of strife.

In London, political sources said that the British Government will produce, within days, a settlement formula intended to sway the province’s Roman Catholic minority away from the underground guerrillas of the Irish Republican Army. Details of the British plan are not yet known, but informed sources in Belfast believe that they will follow broadly some of the proposals put forward by the Irish Republic Prime Minister (Mr Lynch) on Saturday.

These would guarantee Roman Catholics a greater share in the government of the North, ensure the gradual phasing-out of internment, and establish a temporary commission to run the province while Britain and the Republic work out details of a new way to administer the North.

Meanwhile, the quiet residential town of Coleraine is

today preparing tensely rigid security for the Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Widgery) to open his inquiry into Londonderry’s “Bloody Sunday” shootings, in which 13 persons died. Lord Widgery’s movements during the tribunal hearing remain a closelyguarded secret, but a tribunal spokesman said that the Lord Chief Justice would commute daily by helicopter from “somewhere outside Coleraine.” The tribunal could last anything from a week to three months, depending on the number of witnesses to be heard.

In spite of a strong plea by Lord Widgery for Roman Catholics from the Bogside area of Londonderry to be represented, it is thought unlikely that any will be. Relatives of the 13 who died on "Bloody Sunday” and members of the Civil Rights Association, have said that they will boycott the inSuiry; they say they regard te tribunal as neither independent nor impartial, because Lord Widgery was at one time a brigadier in the British Army.

Nine Roman Catholic priests who were in the Bogside district on the day of the shootings have said that they may co-operate. Two Australian lawyers of Irish descent, Mr Jack Birney and Mr Edward

O’Loughlin, arrived in Ulster from Dublin yesterday. They say that they are on a factfinding mission to represent several witnesses at the inquiry, and to observe the proceedings on behalf of the Irish National Association of Australia.

Mr Birney said that representatives of the victims and the Irish National Party would be meeting tonight to decide whether they would appear before the inquiry.

“The situation at the moment is very much in a state of flux,” Mr Birney said. “The meeting could go on all night, and no decision will be likely before the morning. However, at the moment the situation is very tense, and very explosive.

“There are troops in the streets, and action going on. This is something I have never experienced.”

British newspaper coverage of the Ulster troubles was strongly criticised by some journalists from both Fleet Street and the radical press at a public meeting in London on Saturday, the “Observer” reports. More than 500 representatives of the press, television, radio, the theatre and the film industry attended an open forum on “Freedom and Responsibility in the Media.” The “Observer” says that it was the largest meeting of its kind since the foundation,

three years ago, of the Free Communications Group, one of the sponsors of Saturday’s forum.

Mr John O’Callaghan, who resigned from the “Guardian” last month in protest against its Ulster policy, was one journalist present who was critical; he described newspaper coverage of the province as a betrayal. “Newspapers which have made a loss have claimed as their justification to continue to exist that without them we would not obtain diverse and independent coverage of the news,” Mr O’Callaghan said. “But when we are faced with the biggest domestic crisis we have seen for 50 years, the papers betray that front-line justification for their existence.”

A representative of the Marxist paper, “Red Mole,” disagreed with the word “betrayal.” “It is completely consistent with the newspapers’ role in society that they have tried to besmirch the struggle of the Irish people against British imperialism,” he declared. “Daily newspapers play an important role in propagating bourgeois ideology.”