David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

enforced in Belfast. But they were equally anxious about how law and order would be enforced. Their world did not seem fair. The Twelfth, when either their flag or their Pope would be burned in giant bonfires, was only days away. The institution charged with keeping both sides apart during marching season was the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But the RUC was almost entirely Protestant. It belonged to the other side. The RUC had done almost nothing to try to stop the riots the previous summer; a tribunal convened by the British government concluded, after the Protestant Loyalists had torched houses, that the RUC officers had “failed to take effective action.” Journalists at the scene reported Loyalists going up to police officers and asking them if they could borrow their weapons. One of the reasons the British Army had been brought into Northern Ireland was to serve as an impartial referee between Protestant and Catholic. But England was an overwhelmingly Protestant country, so it seemed only natural to Northern Ireland’s beleaguered Catholics that the sympathies of the soldiers would ultimately lie with the Protestants. When a big Loyalist march had run through Ballymurphy in the Easter before the curfew, British soldiers had stood between the marchers and the residents, ostensibly to act as a buffer. But the troops faced the Catholics on the sidewalk and stood with their backs to the Loyalists—as if they saw their job as to protect the Loyalists from the Catholics but not the Catholics from the Loyalists.
    General Freeland was trying to enforce the law in Belfast, but he needed to first ask himself if he had the legitimacy to enforce the law—and the truth is, he didn’t. He was in charge of an institution that the Catholics of Northern Ireland believed, with good reason, was thoroughly sympathetic to the very people who had burned down the houses of their friends and relatives the previous summer. And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash. 6
    The great puzzle of Northern Ireland is why it took the British so long to understand this. In 1969, the Troubles resulted in thirteen deaths, seventy-three shootings, and eight bombings. In 1970, Freeland decided to get tough with thugs and gunmen, warning that anyone caught throwing gasoline bombs was “liable to be shot.” What happened? The historian Desmond Hamill writes:
    The [IRA] retaliated by saying that they would shoot soldiers, if Irishmen were shot. The Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force—an extreme and illegal paramilitary unit—quickly joined in, offering to shoot a Catholic in return for every soldier shot by the IRA. The Times quoted a Belfast citizen saying: “Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really understand what is going on.”
    That year, there were 25 deaths, 213 shootings, and 155 bombings. The British stood firm. They cracked down even harder—and in 1971, there were 184 deaths, 1,020 bombings, and 1,756 shootings. Then the British drew a line in the sand. The army instituted a policy known as “internment.” Civil rights in Northern Ireland were suspended. The country was flooded with troops, and the army declared that anyone suspected of terrorist activities could be arrested and held in prison, indefinitely, without charges or trial. So many young Catholic men were rounded up during internment that in a neighborhood like Ballymurphy, everyone had a brother or a father or a cousin in prison. If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard? Things got even worse. In 1972, there were 1,495 shootings, 531 armed robberies, 1,931 bombings, and 497 people killed. One of those 497 was a seventeen-year-old boy named Eamon. Eamon was Rosemary Lawlor’s little brother. 7
    “Eamon appeared at my door,” Lawlor said. “He said to me, ‘I’d love to stay here for a day or two.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you?’ He said, ‘Ma would have a fit. She would go ballistic.’ Then he confided in myself and my husband that he was getting harassed by the British Army. Every time he was out, every corner he turned, everywhere he went, they were stopping him and they threatened him.”
    Was he actually working with the IRA? She didn’t know, and she said it didn’t matter. “We were all suspects in their