Ulster it

Seal and search

Rawle Knox

• blameless citizen, right credit-worthy and, 111 Lbertondneoenddeders

Imagine yourself (if imagination

good standing at the local golf club, driving on Monday morning from your respectable e home to your office in a British city. You have heard on the radio that wreckers planted bombs in the town centre for the third, weekend running, again ruining severa le shops. This time the government has air nounced, with reluctance, that several cl's. tricts in Britain, including yours, have been a designated special security risks, where emergency regulations will henceforth 13,e applied, as in Northern Ireland. • You don. t know much about security regulations al Northern Ireland except that they certainlY need them there; they may not have finishe off the violence, but that's the Irish for you; You believe firmly in law and order. Only lais' week you wrote to the Daily TelegraP” demanding that something be done to stol/ the bombers in your local city.

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Then, rounding a bend which you recto:al the council should have had widened 100g ago, you see, slewed'half across the road, all, armoured vehicle, stationary. A soldieL standing beside it motions you to stop, whio you have to do pretty smartly anyway to save, your neck. You are politely asked for Y°11„' driving licence, and produce it. You are the"t asked, more formally, to come to the neares army post for questioning. A soldier gets inte) the driving seat of your car (which you hay: sensibly refused to leave by the road) an..' 5. ead rumbles a Saracen, containing three f* h ' Idlers with their guns at the ready. Behind . ne art, eren: :dsto, C. rv vtlsht htwaeaet i tnorhr e0deaoi yrrnaf mogs wAuks fiphanas orecbgi mielonhvfgl ayi above sota, teuceasedwall, now — into a tYou as passenger, moves the machine ott. hencomes another Saracen, similarly crewed. you reach the army post you are orn or twenty people,

recognise as neigh their legs wide , the wall. You are told to take a similar

Lo.sition. You ask if you may telephone a c!i,end, Your home, the office. "Sorry, not till t sl_W_ ondering after what, you take your place „Lungside the silent straddlers. There is no ;Lind but the tramp and clank of a guard r ,alkih up and down behind you. Every now d" then there is a thump, as a soldier claps a '-avY hand on the shoulder of one of the Wing herd, to indicate he is next for in rogation. After twenty minutes the hand us hard on your shoulder, and you are taken another room, where a young officer asks U to identify yourself and give references. c Y this time, possibly, you may ask whether can ring your solicitor. He says no. You . Ive, say, your office department and s ePhone number, perhaps also that of your Lilk manager, and in quite a short time the 5.11,1Y has verified that you are, in fact, your'. You are then taken to another room and it b'gain told to stand, legs straddled, hands 1 °ye the head and against the wall.

5 After a quarter of an hour you are clumped 1,,1 li h7tihneg sahsoiuzeldaebrieapglaaicnaradnodn taken off e two writ

Your te. ,,,ographed. For this operation you stand Your name, address and particulars. The

t -lhera work over, you are shepherded I t to another room again, to stand in a now

Uliliar position. After a further twenty '211iltes the hand falls on you once more. You

',se taken to a desk and asked to sign a "claration that you have not been ill-treated. L,tiovv you would sign yourself over to e'lzebub in order to get out. Eventually you 11,111 the office bursting to spill out your ill'Ignation to the first person who will listen, She says, either in hysteria or cold rage, 'cording to temperament, that troops have • (x,,1-1 to search your house, that her mother v 0 lives with you), swears she had a heart ito'4ck when one of the soldiers poked a gun 1 tilhd the bathroom door, and that they'd had k under the floorboards of the best ,I. ev.00m and the newly fitted carpet would er look the same again.

uch experiences were not rare in Northern and lasit week, as the army extended its 'al and search' operations in answer to rtrlands for tighter security measures. Irzlictably, there have been complaints. 4:1,er Napier, head of that would-be bridging

"-Y, Alliance, called his compatriots the

.urld's champion whiners. There are 4`t1tY who will moan at being held up at LUtloy check-point and then complain about lcsecurity forces letting bombers penetrate .1: towns. Napier also queried the tactics of Military, though not so bitterly as some. "Lve army has often denied it uses methods as I have described above, but it was 414in1y using them last week. One of the Palems of the random search, which unpZutedly gets the army good results, is that 14"'e of those picked up for questioning will 1.:11 out to be not merely innocent, but est4i)) riely reliable witnesses as to their t hence. Nobody believes the IRA's stream eornplaints about deliberate torture, culg ,,,ted sadism, official policy of genocide. Ine,,army gets so accustomed to issuing jus,131Y indignant denials of its total wickedthat it grows to resemble an automatic ;Phone answering service. But the army not be totally good either, and when

something does go wrong, as it must every now and then, army spokesmen trip over each other trying to get the story straight — and believable.

It is never easy for the army in Northern Ireland. Random spot checks could hardly earn the soldiers much love, however they were conducted. But then, in the 'bad' areas, which some would describe as the heartlands of Irish patriotism, there was never much love for them anyway. When I hear the foulness of the abuse daily yelled at the troops, loaded with pervertedly ingenious sexual insult, I marvel at the depth of cool the soldiery contrive to maintain. A child of the Creggan can throw stones before it can stand up, and if it can lisp a few words it can curse. (I have a friend who sends his four year-old son to a Catholic kindergarten in the Creggan, where elder children are allowed no contact with the infants. After a fortnight there this one knew enough language to shock the whole family.) The coloured soldiers, incidentally, are singled out for special insult. So the troops do have a bash now and then, and though the locals then protest vehemently and claim all sorts of damages (there was the mother, you may remember, who complained that a soldier had sworn at her offspring; that was the best of the lot), they know they have won when one of the so-and-sos lets fly, because the whole nasty game is intended to provoke that reaction. The methods of interrogation are far more greatly resented, for they appear as official policy. Especially disliked is the knowledge that one's picture is on an army file.

In his speech last week Oliver Napier also said that the only answer to the violence is for the public to cooperate with the authorities. There he is not alone among politicians, for indeed it would appear fairly obvious. The snag is that in many areas, should you cooperate with the authorities, you will earn at least, as punishment from IRA or UVF, 'a kneecap'. That expression for being, disciplined by a bullet in the leg has now passed into the vernacular. Historians of the current social order in Northern Ireland may reflect that there is little difference in the application of the phrases, "He's lucky not to be in gaol," and "He's lucky not to have had a kneecap."

There is another difficulty for the authorities. The pubhc in Northern Ireland are a very private lot. Some are indeed brave enough to inform the army if they know bombs are being manufactured in their street, because they put the safety of their family before their fear of, of loyalty to, the IRA. But if they know bombs are being made in the neighbouring street, that is someone else's business. In Shantallow, an area of Derry in which most people's doors are open to the IRA, a group of priests and elected councillors did have the gumption to appeal to the people not to help the outlaws, in a statement which ended bravely: "They cannot shoot us all." It made little difference to Shatallow, though the suburb did last week put on a great welcome for the new Bishop of Derry. Bishop Daly has started right in attacking both the bombers and the apathy of the Protestants. Yet 99 per cent of those who are not cooperating with the authorities will tell you they want nothing more than for the violence to go away. Just like that. They have become permanently sorry for themselves in a world that has gone wrong because nobody else will put it right. That is the problem Merlyn Rees inherits, and unless he changes his policy it looks as though we all in Northern Ireland, in our turn, will spent time with our hands up against the wall.