By means of gerrymandering the Unionist party controls two thirds of the seats n the Council in Dungannon, which has a Catholic majority.

If there was any protection under the Government of Ireland Act, surely it ould be invoked here. If Legal Aid existed, surely this man should be able to vail of it. It appeared so to the members of the Campaign who instructed their olicitor to apply for Legal Aid for Mr. McHugh.

When the solicitor lodged the Legal Aid Application Form with the Law ociety of Northern Ireland its secretary wrote to him asking what the heading was nder which Aid was being sought, whether it was "action for a declaration, or pplication for order of mandamus, prohibition or certiorari".

THE CAMPAIGN WAS NOW SPENDING MONEY TO SECURE "FREE" LEGAL AID

Rather than prejudice the application by submitting it in the wrong way, our olicitor advised us it would be safer to consult Senior Counsel about the method >> be used.

The cost of this, paid out of Campaign funds, was £70.

Senior Counsel advised us that technicalities in the law might make it impossible ›r Mr. McHugh to take direct action against Dungannon Urban District Council, nd that it would be better if the action were brought by a ratepayer in the council rea. Mr. Anthony Sheridan, a working man and a ratepayer, aggrieved at the isuse of Council powers in the allocation of houses, offered to be the plaintiff nd Legal Aid was applied for on his behalf.

The services of Junior Counsel were required to prepare and submit an amended egal Aid Application Form. This and other legal expenses is expected to cost the ampaign a further £30, or more.

LEGAL AID REFUSED

The Campaign was notified that Legal Aid had been refused. The refusal aying "the proceedings to which the application related are not proceedings for which legal aid may be given." There was no further information about the reason or its rejection.

Advice of Counsel was again sought and an appeal was made against the efusal, the case being argued before the Legal Aid Committee by Junior Counsel on 23rd Sept. 1966. The Committee reserved its decision and not until 2nd Nov., did it announce the rejection of the appeal because the applicant "has not shown easonable grounds for taking or being a party to proceedings"

Such rejection of Legal Aid appears to be contrary to the spirit and purpose of he Legal Aid Scheme.

Our legal advisers inform us that for working people to finance litigation themelves, up as far as the House of Lords, where their opponents would undoubtedly orce it, were they to lose the case in a lower court, could cost up to £20,000. Therefore, denial of Legal Aid amounts to denial of access to the courts. This ffectively prevents most Northern Ireland citizens from taking Sir Alec DouglasHome's advice, or indeed from taking the same advice given by many Northern reland ministers, the latest being that of the Attorney General Mr. E. W. Jones, .C., when he spoke at Londonderry on 29th October, 1966, namely, to seek legal edress against religious discrimination. Mr. Jones also asserted that there was no eligious discrimination in Northern Ireland nor had there ever been any.

CONCLUSIONS

May we end by quoting from The 1966 Year Book of the National Council for Civil Liberties, an all-party, London-based British institution which is above eproach.

"The introduction of a Legal Aid scheme-seventeen years following that in Britain-will make easier the defence of civil liberties if the regulations within which the scheme is to work are not used restrictively. Legal aid is being sought y citizens of Dungannon in an attempt to challenge in the Courts discrimination against Roman Catholics in the allocation of houses. At present their application 8 submerged in the machinery of the Legal Aid Committee. Rejection of legal aid would be widely regarded as a new form of discrimination in itself, designed to revent this frontal attack on the power to discriminate."

Through the years the British Conservative party could usually count upon up to twelve Ulster Unionists voting with them in the House of Commons at Westminster. Thus they condoned discrimination and gerrymandering and never modified the 1920 Act. They also allowed a "convention" to grow up by which injustices

in Northern Ireland were not allowed to be discussed in the Westminster Parliament.

The Campaign draws attention to Section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 which states:

"Notwithstanding the establishment of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. or anything contained in this Act, the supreme authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom shall remain unaffected and undiminished over all persons, matters, and things in Ireland and every part thereof."

This is a clear, unequivocal statement and is recognised by all political parties. Sir Alec Douglas-Home clearly acknowledged it in his correspondence with the Campaign for Social Justice, and Miss Alice Bacon, a British Minister, has since accepted it on behalf of the Labour Government as a clear statement of the constitutional position.

The Westminster Government recently expressly applied the Prices and Incomes Act 1966 to Northern Ireland, despite the fact that the Act deals with matters within the powers delegated to Stormont. Thereby it demonstrated that it is prepared to exercise its over-riding authority when it regards this as expedient. The present British Labour Government has refused the request of over a hundred of its own back-benchers called the “Campaign for Democracy in Ulster" group to set up a Royal Commission to enquire into Northern Ireland affairs. Surely it is anomalous for Britain to concern itself so seriously with matters of justice in so many other countries, whilst doing nothing about the situation in Northern Ireland?

ULSTER'S POINT OF NO RETURN?

(By Rev. Donald R. Campion, reprinted from America, March 4, 1972)

year and a half has brought striking changes. The Stormont government's internment policy has created an unbridgeable gap between it and the families of its victims. The once respected British military presence is feared and hated As we drove into Belfast, 18 months almost to the day since my last visit re, I cautioned my companions, who had never seen the city before, that beauty-like that of the king's daughter-lies mainly within. In fact, I recalled, ournalist once remarked that Belfast had the unique capacity to make a town e Albany, N.Y., seem like Paris.

This time, as before, Belfast impressed one right off as quintessentially the ur, blighted, 19th-century industrial city that any novelist would dream of as ckground for a story of grim life in provincial England. If anything, the preșce of a scattering of new buildings of contemporary design increases one's se that the city had unwisely cornered the market on squat, dark red brick ildings, then hired a town planner to lay them out in the most unimaginative ssible design and finally brought in a soot expert to lay down a dulling protece coat over any buildings that might threaten to brighten the landscape. All this, of course, is said out of a prejudice that comes from having first stopped in Dublin with its elegant Georgian rows, its endless variety and liveliness, mildly chaotic bustle that succeeds in distracting one from its dank slums and shock of the Liffey's noisome reality.

But Belfast, at best, is no City of Light. And today, not even Prime Minister ian Faulkner would claim that Belfast is at its best.

This time, the no-nonsense, plainspoken ugliness of Belfast had undergone a otle transformation. The changes added up to an atmosphere that enveloped niliar streets and buildings in a tensely menacing way.

Wherever you drive, there is the reminder of the "ramps"-carefully engineered tterns of high bumps in the roadbed that force passing cars to slow down to a wl. Instinctively, in riding over a set of ramps one looks for the pillbox manned British troops on guard before a local police station or other strategic spot. e sight of a rifle in the young soldier's hands is no shock, because you've initably encountered one or more army trucks along the way, with one Tommy erally "riding shotgun" and two more standing up in the back of the truck, refully scanning all sides, with rifles at the ready.

Then, too, in almost any section of the city you will have come upon burnt-out bombed-out buildings-homes, or hotels or shops, with an exceptionally heavy l of pubs among them.

For me the new climate of the city hit home hardest the first time I had to make y way into the spanking new Europa Hotel in the heart of downtown Belfast. automobile can enter the curving driveway that leads up to the main entrance. he nearest parking was at curbside on the street. And anyone entering must stop st at a sentry booth to be electronically "frisked" by the guard. If you are found lean," you then go up to the center door of this fashionable, twelve-story hotel da bellhop unlocks the only revolving door in use. Once inside, I must confess, e's instinct is to head first for the bar and a stiff drink of the best available sh whiskey.

Much more striking, and far more significant, of course, is the change in the ychology of the people over the past year and a half. This comes through, for stance, in the note of strain beneath casual chatter, even when the conversation about the humor of human foibles and follies that emerge in the tensest situations. (All Irishmen are born story-tellers and crisis simply waters their native genius. ories, too, sum up so much of the tragic absurdities of the moment. I think, for stance, of the story of an elderly Catholic woman out shopping. When she made r way back, laden with packages, to the corner of her home street, she found the ad blocked by British troops making a surprise raid of every home in the ighborhood in search of arms or revolutionaries. The commanding officer

finally yielded to her wails and detailed a young soldier to escort the woman to her flat. When they reached the door and the lad had helped her in with her bundles, she turned and said: "Sure, you're a good boy for helping an old woman. May you have a cool seat in hell for your kindness.")

Belfast women, particularly, reveal their tension by smoking with an intensit that can't be concealed or ignored. And you can understand why when you listen to stories like the two I heard from a coolly sophisticated suburban housewife married to a successful Protestant barrister. Both concerned her five-year-old daughter. One day the little girl, after raptly watching a TV newscast on local ! bombings, asked: "Mommy, are we Protestants the baddies?" And more recently, there was a new twist when the mother parked her car outside a shop and instructed the youngster, as she had so often in the past, to stay in the car and be good. Unexpectedly, the child tensed up and then burst into violent sobs. "What's wrong with you, silly girl," the mother asked, "I'm only going to be a minute in the store." Finally, the hidden fear was blurted out: "But Mommy, those men will come by and shoot me."

Strangely enough, on this visit, the "coolest" reactions I experienced in company with Fr. David Bowman, S.J., a special assistant to the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches here in the U.S.A., and the Rev. Wesley C. Baker, of the Commission of Ecumenical Mission and Relations of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, were among the residents of Belfast's Fall Road district, a Catholic "ghetto" and center of violence in part owing to its inmediate proximity to the Shankill, a thoroughly Protestant, lower-income sector. An earlier conversation with Betty Sinclair, founding mother of Ulster' miniscule Communist party and unparalleled "valiant woman" of the Northern Ireland trade union movement, had prepared me for these personal accounts of the "midnight knock" and the resentful dread it evoked in the Catholic community. As a child back in the early 1920's, Betty had lived across the street from Catholic though her own family was Church of Ireland (Anglican). In her customary blunt labor movement language, she had told me of the horror of awakening to a pounding at the door of a neighbor in the middle of the night, the sleepless hours d· wondering who had been carried off by the troops and the sorrowful encounter next morning with the grieving, bewildered members of the victimized family.

Betty's account, interlaced as it was with candid and frequently damning i expressions of opinion about the Northern Ireland government, past and present, had not prepared me, however, for the remarkable tone of several conversations I had in homes of interned men in the Falls Road area. The mothers and wives we met spoke in a calm, almost detached manner that simply emphasized the brutal nature of their bitter experience.

I think, for instance, of one young girl, in her early twenties at most, cradling her baby in her arms as she quietly recalled for us the first night the British troops broke into her home at three in the morning, woke her and her husband in bed and gave them two minutes to dress-meanwhile turning everything upside-down in the neat little house.

At the time, she was seven and a half months pregnant. Now her infant son was ten weeks old and his father had seen him only once, the day he was born. Was it resignation that kept her voice so low and free of passion? Or was it the weariness that comes from sheer frustration and an overpowering sense of helplessness?

The one bitter note that crept into her voice came when the young girl told of her husband's first stay in prison following that early morning raid. After some days of interrogation and a certain amount of rough handling, she told us, he received a "fatherly" talk from one of the officers. The gist of it was a suggestion that the military thought he might not be such a bad boy after all. In fact, they might be able to send him home. For his welfare, mind you, he might want to demonstrate his good sense and reliability by sending the officer each week at unsigned letter with a report of anything "interesting" he noticed going on in his neighborhood. The boy was in fact released, didn't write any letters and was picked up ("lifted") again the day after his son was born. He is still in internment and only Prime Minister Brian Faulkner or the British government knows when he will be free.

There was, I thought, a certain undefinably indecent appearance to the mimegraphed form letter another young wife showed me. It was her official notification from the Stormont government that her husband had been interned and that sh might apply to the governor of the internment camp for permission to visit hinno specification of charges, no procedure for providing the prisoner with legal counsel and, obviously, no hint as to how long internment might last.

When I looked at the name of the internee inked into the appropriate place on at rough form, I understood better why an unbridgeable gap now divides the nilies, and friends of families, that have received such notices and the governent that issues them. Even at the time of my conversation with Prime Minister ulkner in his office in Stormont Castle, I had wondered about popular acceptance his confident statement that the internment process was both necessary and st because he had personally reviewed each of the five or six hundred files before ning the individual internment orders.

Most of all, this time around in Northern Ireland, I sensed the new depth and eadth of this division. Eighteen months ago, circulating among the Catholic nority in Northern Ireland, one met up with expressions of mistrust or bitter erences to past injustices of the government over five decades. But most men d women spoke chiefly of steps that might be taken to reform the Stormont vernment and permit Catholics to have a fair voice within the existing political der. The issue of reunification of North and South of Ireland came up, but it is not the burning order of business.

Within the past year and a half, however, the events described by Father George Dunne, S.J., in his article, "The Irish Sea of Troubles," elsewhere in this ue, have radically changed all that. Gerry Fitt, for example, head of the opsition Social Democratic Labor Party and a member of both the Stormont and estminster parliaments, put it in characteristic, blunt fashion at his home arvelous Ireland with a politician's small study decorated by pictures of James nnolly, prophet of Irish socialism, John F. Kennedy and the Sacred Heart!) e night before the Derry tragedy of January 30. "Partition doesn't solve anying," he insisted to us, even though he went on to emphasize that "any organizaon that thinks it can gain unification through murdering innocent people and ooting down a young policeman in front of his wife and children is out of its nd."

Part of the unfolding tragedy in Northern Ireland, of course, is that events like ose of "Bloody Sunday" in Derry make it increasingly difficult for a balanced litical leader like Fitt to keep people convinced of the wisdom of moderation d the folly of recourse to violence. At the moment, clearly, nothing is more agic than the process by which the begrudging respect of the Catholic minority r the British military presence in Ulster as an instrument of law and justice has rned into almost total distrust and hatred for the troops. And a by-product of is process, in all too many instances, is acceptance of the Irish Republican my's claim that it alone defends the helpless and protects their rights in the orth.

No question but that the extremist-whether he be of the Irish Republican my brand or of the diehard Orange Lodge breed—welcomes the present state tension as a gift from heaven. He sees every event as further proof that the only olution" lies in a violent assault on the "enemy."

What a shock, then, to discover in many Catholic circles in a city like Belfast e extent of a sympathy bordering on admiration for the IRA man that was most totally absent less than two years ago. And how easily a passing stranger n miss the grim reality beneath calm and innocent appearances. One night, r instance, in walking through a few blacked-out streets (the British military efer to keep all street lamps darkened so as to hinder any would-be snipers) of e Falls Road area, I noticed the frequency with which walls of buildings at the rner of side streets had been daubed with whitewash.

My first reaction was surprise that the techniques of neighborhood improvement weeping up the debris, planting window flower boxes and painting over graffitiarred fences and walls) had spread to Belfast from the slums of Philadelphia id New York. My guide soon set me straight, however. The intent behind the hitewashing was considerably less than neighborly. It was to help snipers who uld more easily pick out soldiers against a white background as they turned rners in a midnight patrol of the area. So far had the lines of division hardened. One of my most vivid recollections of a remarkably free-flowing and informative terview with William Cardinal Conway, Catholic Primate of All Ireland and rchbishop of Armagh, is of his candid self-analysis in discussing his efforts as a iritual leader to speak out against injustices and yet remind his fellow Catholics at violence is never the answer for them. One sensed with considerable respect, he reminisced on his own childhood in one of Ulster's Catholic "ghettos," at he felt obliged constantly to check his judgments and impulses for any idue impact of "tribal" emotions or instincts. For Cardinal Conway surely