Word: unionistic
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Down at Paddy McClure's betting shop in Belfast on election morning, the odds were 50 to 1 against the defeat of Northern Ireland's Prime Minister Captain Terence O'Neill. Even though the infighting within his Unionist Party had been severe and Catholic-Protestant hatreds were as vitriolic as ever, the odds makers-and a host of other experts as well-were certain that the electorate would come out firmly in favor of O'Neill and his policies of reconciliation. They were wrong. Most of O'Neill's hand-picked candidates had been...
...taunt may be fresh, but the sentiment is not. Having governed their country as a virtual Protestant theocracy since Ireland was partitioned in 1920, the Orangemen of the North pay scant heed to Catholic feelings or, often, to Catholic rights. The Unionist Party monopolized the central government at Storemont from the first, and it has kept power-including voting power-in the hands of the Protestant haves. Businessmen, for example, command up to six votes each in local elections. Nor do the burdens of a chronically weak economy fall equally: unemployment in some Catholic areas runs as high...
...activists but also for New Left militants, Communists and even a few liberal Protestants. Last summer near the town of Dungannon, a 29-year-old opposition M.P. named Austin Currie staged a sit-in to protest the assignment of a family flat to the unmarried teenage secretary of a Unionist bigwig. The protest quickly spread to Londonderry, where a system of blatant gerrymandering has resulted in the two-thirds Catholic majority's getting only one-third of the public-built housing; it eventually turned into a nationwide campaign for reapportionment and for the "one-man, one-vote" principle...
...patrician, soft-spoken former Irish Guards captain who has been Prime Minister since 1963, was already trying to parlay that sympathy into a vote of confidence in his gradual program for equality. But when activist demonstrators began joining the protest ranks, extremist groups within O'Neill's Unionist Party reacted violently. Among the first to express its ire was the oligarchic Orange Order, a powerful political-religious society whose members have included all Prime Ministers and virtually every Cabinet Minister in Northern Ireland's history. Like others, it has been particularly skillful in playing on the fears...
...Protestants, perhaps the most galling provocation came last October when Catholic marchers paraded within Londonderry's Old Walls, a Unionist shrine. Convinced that the protesters had overstepped all bounds, Protestant bigots soon began organizing counterdemonstrations. Their spokesman was fiery Ian Paisley, leader of the extremist Free Presbyterian Church, who rarely misses an opportunity to vent his rabidly anti-Catholic views. He refers to the Roman Catholic church as "the greatest dictatorship in the world," and his newspaper has come up with the singular suggestion that the Viet Nam war is a Jesuit conspiracy...