DAVE MANSE,LL tion was so strong that the British government had to send troops to establish a "peace-line" between the two communities. Before the British arrived, however, the I.R.A. in Dublin held mass meetings to demand the intervention of the Irish Republic's army to "liberate" Derry. The Irish government <lid in fact begin to move the troops to the frontier. Between August 1969 and Easter 1970 the Catholic community in Belfast were treated to most of the reforms that the civil rights agitation had demanded. The "B" Specials were disbanded, the RUC were disarmed, reformed and kept out of the Catholic areas, and Catholic Belfast was left alone. In that same time the Provisional I.R.A. was built up in the Belfast ghetto where they established an urban foco that has enabled them to remain in action though on an increasingly reduced basis to the present day. lt gradually emerged that the Provisionals, who were the mainline separatist nationalist section of the I.R.A. had been supplied with money and arms by ministers in the Fianna Fail government in the South. POLITICALSTALEMATE Sean Lemass had been replaced in 1966 by Jack Lynch but only after a ifierce struggle with Charles Haughey who remained an influenctial ,figure in the cabinet. Along with another cabinet minister, Neil Blaney, whose power base was in Donegal, Haughey, who had been born in County Detry, was dedicated to the military solution of the "Northern problem" but they were disturbed by the "Marxist" orientation of the leadership of the I.R.A. who wanted to spread the struggle into the southern arena so they financed a split away by the northern command of the I.R.A. provided that they abandoned political operations in the Republic. In fact the Provisionals have gone so far as to become the promoters of a populist economic policy of a republic of workers and small farmers, completely out of touch with any developments in any part of Ireland; its economics are reflected in its mafiastyle control of local retail trade in the Catholic ghettos which it still controls. The Provisionals are now a rearguard action in all seríses, though with the return of Jack Lynch and Fianna Fail to power in Ireland in recent weeks, on the vote of precisely the kind of small farmer they claim to be :fighting for, and with the retention of Charles Haughey in the Lynch government, reports in The Sunday Times that 70
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