Within the law
The troops' job in Ulster is particularly difficult and can certainly be nasty. They are operating in their own country or almost their own country, and within the range of civil laws. There is an inquest on every person they shoot and the soldier concerned has to give evidence. The best verdict he can hope for is 'death by misadventure'. There have already been one or two unsatisfactory open verdicts and there is always the risk of a verdict of manslaughter being brought against the soldier. One soldier is at the mo- ment facing a charge of malicious wounding, having fired while on patrol duty.
The main direct guerrilla enemy is the IRA, now operating in very small, virtually .
autonomous, units. Cathal Goulding, IRA chief in Dublin, is not thought to exercise
much more than a moral or prestigious authority. The army clearly now feels a restrained confidence; and were it not for the hard-line extreme right-wing Protestants anxious to provoke further sectarian hostility and violence, which obviously encourages a
tolerance of the IRA among the Catholics, then already the purely military aspect of the Ulster situation would look quite good.
As it is, there remains always the ever- present risk that extremist action from either side will provoke a bloodbath which ten thousand British troops would be quite unable to control. The brooding threat hangs heavily over the land.
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