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By Root 956 0

Basques were granted were never implemented. Relatives of ETA prisoners are aggrieved that they have to make a two-thousand-kilometre round trip on a coach for each forty-minute visit to their fathers or husbands in remote Huelva. People suspected of ETA involvement claim they have been beaten, given electric shocks or threatened with rape with a vibrator, although forensic physicians dispute such claims. What is not in dispute is that ETA has waded sufficiently far out into a river of blood that it cannot psychologically turn back. To do so would dishonour so many of its own glorious dead. Successive Spanish governments have resisted talks with ETA, and eventually banned Herri Batasuna, which meant that a few Basque towns were disfranchised. That in turn meant that supposedly democratic nationalist politicians, beyond Batasuna, emitted ambiguous responses to ETA violence sufficient to justify it. At present, ETA is attempting to extort immense sums of four hundred thousand euros from each of the two thousand Basque businesses it has sent threatening letters to. The situation is so grave and complex that the Northern Irish Redemptorist priest Alex Reid is among those clerics trying to resolve it. There is a wealth of grim experience there too.9

II STATES OF SIEGE

The Northern Irish countryside is as lushly green as the Basque country, but the skies tend to be grey and louring rather than blue. The cities are less elegant, consisting at the centre of rows of red-brick terraces of two-up-and-two-down houses, and vast housing estates which feel very grim under the glare of the sodium lights that make so many British cities seem like they have been drowned in a fizzy drink at night. Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland had core political and socio-economic rights, including the vote at general elections, a free press, and levels of state welfare that did not exist in the Irish Republic. This was one of the reasons why the Republic’s claims to the North remained largely rhetorical—albeit asserted in its constitution—since picking up the social security tab north of the border would have bankrupted an Eire to which EEC structural subsidies were as yet a dream unfulfilled. Take a few vital statistics.

Although Northern Ireland had half the population of the Republic, in 1964 it had ninety-five thousand children in secondary schools, as opposed to eighty-five thousand in Eire. Northern Ireland’s schools were and are some of the best in the United Kingdom. Using contemporary British decimal coin rather than historic shillings, in 1963 the Republic spent 85p per head on university education; the equivalent sum for Northern Ireland was £2.44. In 1969 an unemployed man in Northern Ireland received £4.50 a week while his unemployed opposite number in the South got £3.25; the same disparity existed for a widow’s weekly pension in both countries too. Northern Ireland was not South Africa or the US Deep South. Except for a few diehard bigots there were no impediments to social (or sexual) intercourse between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Protestant friends of mine from Dungannon say that they often dated Catholic girls, who tended to be more feminine than the butch Unionists. Unlike the US Deep South, they could do this without fear of being lynched. There was another distinction. African-Americans marched for equal rights, not to abolish the Union, which is what many Irish republican civil rights activists wanted.10

However, in some parts of Northern Ireland both access to social housing and control of local government were blatantly gerrymandered. In narrowly Protestant-dominated Dungannon, for example, no Catholics were offered a permanent council house for nearly a quarter of a century. There was also the curious way in which 911,940 registered electors entitled to vote for the provincial parliament at Stormont became 658,778 voters in local government elections. Although Londonderry was 60 per cent Catholic, Unionists had a permanent majority of 12: 8 on the city council. This was achieved by excluding Catholic