Grim irony in directions to home of Irish M.P.

Press, 8 March 1989, Page 48

Grim irony in directions to home of Irish M.P.

NZPA-Reuter Dungannon Turn right at the undertaker’s, drive up through Dungannon and you come to the bungalow of a British member of Parliament whose constituency has been the scene of 200 killings in 20 years. “It is dreadfully depressing,” conceded Ken Maginnis, who checks under his car every day for booby-trap I.R.A. bombs and never opens the door of his house until he knows who you are. "Close to the frontier, there is this feeling of being besieged,” he said. There is a certain grim irony to the directions he gives for visitors to his unmarked bungalow. Undertakers in Northern Ireland have been sure of a steady trade over the last two decades. Almost 3000 people have died in the Irish Republican Army battle to oust Britain from Northern Ireland and Mr Maginnis is certainly not short of statistics, all kept carefully in his computerlike grim electronic tombstones. “Since 1976, there have been 118 murders in my constituency. 117 of those were by the I.R.A. and one by Loyalists (Protestant paramilitary extremists). Only one in 12 murders has been solved. The total since the start of the troubles is 204,” he said. Mr Maginnis, who holds the border constituency for the Official Unionist Party that fervently wants Northern Ireland to stay British, said: “Terrorism is not understood by people outside. “Many tend to think of it as isolated incidents — a policeman killed there, a soldier there. They don’t see it in terms of a whole community being terrified. When nobody has been murdered for a month, there is a build-up of tension.” “I knew it was you at the door, but I wouldn’t let you in until I had checked. I still look under my car every day before I get into it. That is the way a lot of people live and succeed in living around here.” Mr Maginnis cites the prophetic words of a friend with whom he went on patrol during the early 1970 s when they were both in the Ulster Defence Regiment, whose locally recruited soldiers are a prime I.R.A. “soft target” when off-duty. While they were sipping coffee in Mr Maginnis’s kitchen, his friend told him, "before these troubles are over, there will not be a house in the country untouched by them.” He was killed on patrol in an I.R.A. ambush on April 11, 1974. Mr Maginnis’s constitu-

ency includes Enniskillen, where 11 people were killed by an I.R.A. bomb that devastated a war memorial ceremony in November, 1987. The attack was internationally condemned. Last month, the I.R.A. decided to disband and disarm one of its border “active service units” after 23 people were killed in a string of bungled bomb attacks stretching back to the Enniskillen war memorial massacre. Mr Maginnis had been constantly supplying the names of suspected members of the unit to the Belfast and Dublin police forces, the British Army and to the British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher. He did not go public with their names. “They have been identified. They have been slowed down in their effectiveness,” he said. After a 20-year conflict between an estimated 250 I.R.A. gunmen and a 10,000-strong British Army force, Mr Maginnis forcefully argues: “We are not fighting an unwinnable war by any means. There is a military solution for terrorist outrages. “You must begin to dismantle the communications and control structure and the only way you can do this is by selective internment. As soon as someone steps in to fill the gap, you pull him out.” Internment without trial was last used in the early 1970 s when about 2000 people, almost all of them Republican sympathisers, were rounded up. Britain faced a barrage of international criticism and the I.R.A. pushed its guerrilla campaign to new heights. To Mr Maginnis, “the I.R.A. is like a company in business. You lose key members from the board of directors. The firm does not go to the wall. It recruits new talent. But what would happen if you pulled out the new managing director every time? Before long, the company would stop paying dividends.” In spite of the fact that he was clutching a handful of statistics about death on his Parliamentary patch, the rotund and avuncular Mr Maginnis said: “I wouldn’t choose to work in any other constituency. We are a close knit community with a sense of family. “I certainly haven’t been immune to the tragedy, but I would be telling lies to say I was living in an ongoing state of hopelessness. There is a feeling that if we could just achieve a breakthrough, this would be a good country.”