ULSTER
Taylor talks
STAN GEBLER DAVIES
'If they want to murder one another, then why don't we get out and let the bleeders get on with it?' is not. an uncommon attitude among British citizens who happen not to live in the Irish part of the United Kingdom, and it is an attitude which the IRA hopes to encourage by killing British soldiers.
Mr John Taylor, the Minister of State for Home Affairs in Northern Ireland, is the person most responSible, after Major Chichester-Clark, for keeping order in the state, in so far as the Government retains that responsibility. It is his business to fight the IRA. Mr Taylor is a tough character of thirty-four, who hardly concealed his distaste -for Terence O'Neill. His appointment as Minister of State last August provoked uproar among the Opposition, who showed their disapproval by refusing to ask him questions. The Prime Minister kept the Home Affairs ministry himself when Mr Taylor was appointed, but Mr Taylor had effective control of the department.
'What happens depends on what the IRA do,' Mr Taylor told me last week at Stor- mont. 'We know they have training camps in the Republic of Ireland and we know they have arms. We don't know what line they'll take, but wd can smash them. There are two ways they can operate. First, by isolated shooting incidents in side streets. The Army can handle that. Second, they can use the Republic as a base to blow up installations over here, and the Ulster Defence Regiment can handle that.'
Mr Taylor, mentioning the training camps in the Republic, does not mean to imply that the Irish government is not trying to suppress them. 'If I had any lack of satisfaction about that,' he remarks, 'then you can be sure I would let them know.' The Irish police have recently raided two camps, but there are others, and the Irish courts are by no means always ready to convict, even on irrefutable evidence.
A tougher policy for dealing with street riots has already begun in Belfast. Binlid- banging ladies and petrol-bombing children are to find themselves as liable to snatch- squad treatment as their husbands and fathers. Mr Taylor notes with satisfaction that the number of hard-core rioters has greatly diminished. The new tactics of the ma, however, go beyond rioting. A man with a machine-gun is not a spontaneous rioter.
The Provisionals (that is to say, the non- Communist majority wing of the IRA) claim that the shooting in Belfast last week was in self-defence, after the Army had attempted to disarm Catholic citizens in a house-to- house search, a point of view which some Opposition Nes at Stormont agree with. It is undoubtedly true that many members of the IRA in Belfast see themselves as engaged in defensive action. It is also true that IRA policy is one of deliberate murder.
The fight against the IRA is probably being won. In the year 1970, according to Mr Taylor's figures, these arms and explosives were seized after searches by the security forces: eighty-two rifles, 106 pistols, ten machine guns, 484 lbs of explosives, 49,726 rounds of ammunition, and various other bits of lethal paraphernalia. There is also the simple, if cruel, fact that as the IRA moves in- to open conflict with the British Army, its numbers diminish.
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