PRESS GANG Bolting the lid on the Irish war

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Anniversary time: but not the usual glossy "look back" with which newspapers will greet any : anniversary, however trivial.

Ten years of the British army on the streets of Belfast and Derry. Ten years they said couldn't happen. Ten years of temporary solutions. Ten years of ringing editorials, lies, and propaganda. len • years in public relations for British imperialism.

It was little wonder that the 10th birthday celebrations for the troops were muted. Like grey hair it had crept up on the press when it wasn't looking.

The Guardian is a good place to start., There is ...- -main always something particularly loathsome about liberals who discover that their interests and those of the bourgeoisie are identical.

Critical

The Guardian has often complained over lack of civil rights, and at some points over the last decade has even taken in its news columns a critical approach to the army.

But its editorials have over the same period been a model of good Orange orthodoxy.

And in looking back over the decade, the Guardian was at pains to support the two main myths of the agethat British troops were sent in to "protect" the Catholics and that by and large the Irish "do it to themselves"

Their Washington correspondent, who was in Northern Ireland in 1969, began his look back by lingering over a scene in which a Catholic family worked as a team to produce a quick petrol bomb to use on the Derry barricades.

While a massive onslaught against the Catholic population by the B specials and the Orange mobs was taking place, the Guardian memory bank turns this on its head by describing: "the whole city fallen into virtual anarchy, petrol bombs, bricks and bottles cascading around the men of the RUC"

The apprentice boys march through the Catholic quarter of Derry brings the memory that: "you could smell the violence in the streets" and the "blame" for that violence erupting is put on a middle-aged Catholic with a catapult:

"He stood in the jeering crowd of Catholics locked behind the police barricade in the city centre, and loosed off stone after stone at the marching Orangemen."

Such triviality is the stock in trade of apologists for the army. The Guardian also recalls Terence O'Neil as someone who made 'humane and sincere efforts to right the grievances of the minority"

A gloomy piece from Iohn Hooper in Belfast. however, finds that the army no longer claims many breakthroughs in getting information about IRA attacks, and that the feeling of impotence "which has characterised the army's mood • over the past ten years"' has been heightened rather than diminished.

Predictably, Hooper's only policy is that: "some form of political initiative is urgently needed if the security situation is not to go into slow but sure decline"

The Daily Telegraph ran a half-hearted look back from Colin Brady in Derry, which was eclipsed by the reports: in the same paper of the IRA's August 12th show of strength.

"Most of today's troops were still at school a decade ago. Although no war officially exists and no battle honours can be won, 301 regular soldiers have been killed by bombers and gunners..: ' "On warm, sunny evening in 1969 when men of the Prince of Wales Own