21 AUGUST 1971, Page 22

Direct rule?

Sir: With respect, in contending that the Stormont government has failed, and there must now be direct rule from Westminster in Ulster, 1 you place yourself, or perhape I should say Britain, in the position of having first insured that a thing would fail, and then triumphantly pointing out that it had done so. At the very onset of the present troubles in the North, Britain disarmed the RUC and disarmed and 'stood down the Specials, both of which had formerly dealt with IRA campaigns fairly efficiently, and then, having done so, proceeded next to use the Army to control the militant Protestants while allowing the IRA time to organise their units, and indeed to march in military formation at funerals on what the first Labour government after the war declared was British territory in perpetuity.

But let that be, is it really left to a poor layman Irish poet to point the moral of the situation as of now?

I accept that Britain cannot leave Ireland now or ever. There must be a British base in Ireland for the foreseeable future. If Britain were to submit to pressure and leave not only would bier own security be placed in jeopardy, but the security of all Western Europe, and obviously therefore of NATO, since it would be possible for an all-Ireland government at any time to sign a treaty with a foreign power hostile to Britain, and this means at present Soviet Russia and no one else.

But since this is so, and since it seems neither a confederation of equal sovereign states of England, Scotland, Wales, the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland, nor some federation of these, not even the setting up Protestant and Catholic cantons in Ulster, is on the cards, there remains only one practical course to take, namely the setting up of an actual as distinct from paper border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. I mean a Berlin wall type of thing, though it would be necessary to run more than the double barbed-wire and electrified wire fencing right across the paper border in the first place, at least until a permanent frontier had been established, as between European states. Then, after a necessary transfer of populations we should have a situation not all that different from the idea of The Pale. English law to run on one side, Irish law on the other. And don't say it would not work. I remind you Belgium and Holland were once once one country, but have developed separately, necessarily so.

I am sure it would not take more than a month or six weeks for the British army engineers to set up such a real border. To me, it is downright nonsense to talk of watching for IRA suspects at Brit ish ports who might try to come here to Britain, it is said, to escape interment in the North. What on earth should they want to do this for, when they have the whole open border to cross into the Irish Republic to escape to, where quite possibly their own families would await, and a government which would ignore their background, as Mr Lynch has now made quite clear the Irish government will? Or does the British army think it can stop gun-running across open fields, and even houses where half the house is in Eire the other half in Northern Ireland? The trouble is the immemorial refusal of the British to treat the Irish seriously, but now with Soviet Russia in the background hovering and waiting, and the two wings of the IRA reunited to " fight the common enemy" Britain's own freedom and security is in peril.

If I'm wrong in all this, then will you please present some other constructive suggestion that is not merely playing about with words, as suggestions of meetings between the three governments are, to say the least. Do you expect Mr Faulkner to talk with the man who has said he and his government at Stormont must go? I offer these remarks in good faith, and because

I am appalled by what I see unfolding, not least the apparent determination of the British left and the media of TV, both channels, to discredit the British army's role in Ulster, and finally because I am deeply concerned for the Security and well-being of all the peoples of both these islands, and not merely those of one of the two. And I do not believe a Catholic Ireland of three million should ever be allowed to dictate to a Britain of fifty-four million, because that is the negation of democracy. Yet Parnell held Parliament to ransom again and again, and today the armed men of the IRA, together now with the political movement for a Gaelic-Catholic Ireland led by the Irish government itself, are just beginning to hold all Britain to ransom, under direct threat of murder and the destruction of the entire Northern province. No glossing can hide this fact, nor what the response, if democracy is to be saved, must be.

I repeat, Soviet Russia is waiting in the wings. Ewan Milne 46 DeParys Avenue, Bedford