Catholic church
still under seige in
Northern Ireland

NATION/WORLD

The Michigan Daily - Friday, December 6, 1996 - 9

BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland
(AP) -Taunts, jeers and rocks at Mass
every weekend, and now an arson attack
on a church school at night: Our Lady
the Mother of Christ is a congregation
under siege.
The Rev. Eamonn Cowan, like the
other three priests who live in the parish
house beside the Roman Catholic
church, sleeps somewhere else each
night.
"We couldn't take the risk, you know,
of being burned alive," says Cowan,
who serves a dwindling Catholic
minority in Harryville, on the south
side of this mostly Protestant town.
It's a stark example of how low com-
munity relations have sunk in parts of
Northern Ireland since the British-ruled
province was on the brink of peace in
1994, when gunmen on both sides
called cease-fires.
Each Saturday for 12 weeks,
Protestant hooligans have gathered out-
side the church before evening Mass,
waving Union Jacks and hurling abuse,
bottles, eggs and firecrackers. The
church's exterior is marred both by the
steel grills protecting the windows and
vulgar, misspelled graffiti.
Arsonists yesterday damaged the
Catholic elementary school and threw
gasoline bombs at two houses - one
belonging to a Catholic family, the
other to a Protestant woman with- a
Catholic boyfriend. No one was injured,
but both families were left homeless.

The siege of Our Lady began Sept.
14, hours after militant Catholics
blocked the Orange Order, the
province's main pro-British Protestant
organizatiton, from marching to a
Presbyterian church in Dunloy, a most-
ly Catholic village 12 miles away.
Several previous parades had been
blocked.
It follows a summer of widespread
rioting in Northern Ireland after
Catholics blocked traditional Protestant
marches.
The Harryville pickets said Catholics
couldn't attcnd their churches if they
wouldn't let Protestants march to theirs.
Only seven worshipers made it to Mass
that first night.
"It is quite frightening to walk past a
jeering, taunting crowd," said parish-
ioner Delia Close.
"And then once you're inside the
chapel, all may be quiet - perhaps the
priest is preaching, perhaps we're pray-
ing, perhaps siinging - and then a fire-
work will go off, or there'll be a loud
cheer, or mayibe the sound of a crowd
getting angry.
"It's not the way you should have to
go to Mass."
The protests, seemed to ebb - until
Catholics again barred Orangemen
from snowbound Dunloy on Nov. 23.
On Saturday, thugs threw gasoline
bombs at 300 riot police outside the
church, burned a bus and surrounded a
Catholic woman's car.

CABINET
Continued from Page 1
diplomats at the United Nations and
elsewhere in the world. Critics have
sometimes contended that she lacks a
strategic view of the U.S. foreign policy
role.
Thanking Clinton for her selection,
Albright called for changes in interna-
tional relations and global institutions,
including the
United Nations.
"We live in an
era without power
blocs, in which oldh
assumptions must
be re-examined,
institutions mod-
ernized, and rela-
tionships trans-
formed," she said.
And she men- Aibright
tioned the agoniz-
ing tug of war with Congress over fund-
ing of diplomatic programs.
"I understand that the task of
defending the expenditure of dollars
overseas is not an easy one, especially
now when the Cold War is over and
nuclear weapons no longer target our
homes," she said. "But if American
leadership is to continue ... we must
commit the resources needed to meet
our fair share of obligations and
responsibility."
Cohen, 56, has spent much of his 24
years in Congress working on defense

issues, including recently on the
Senate Armed Services and intelli-
gence committees. A lawyer and writer
of poetry and novels, Cohen irritated
some party colleagues by voting to
impeach President Nixon in 1974, and
denouncing some of President
Reagan's conduct during the Iran-
Contra affair.
He has not hesitated to attack
Clinton's foreign policy. He has
assailed the administration for its shift-
ing Bosnia policy, and contended
Clinton has not been forceful enough in
trying to curb Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein.
Yet Cohen told reporters at the
White House yesterday that "my entire
congressional career has been devoted
to pursuing a national security policy
that is without partisanship, and so the
scenario that the president has present-
ed to me was one that I could look for-
ward with great enthusiasm to support-
ing."
Clinton, speaking with reporters,
said he had no fear that Cohen would
strike out on his own. "We go out of
our way to follow a process that
encourages people to be independent,"
he said.
One administration official contend-
ed that the selection of a Republican at
defense would make it easier for the
administration to resist GOP demands
for new spending on weapons. "This
will help in saying no," this official
said.


Michael Kearney, principal at St. Mary's Primary School in Ballymeha, Northern
Ireland, surveys the damage to the school yesterday after an arson attack during
the night.
"I had to get out of the car. They were Mass and started kicking the doors.
going to burn it," said Beth Reid, chok- "I screamed" she said. "I thought
ing back tears as she recalled how a maybe the police would hear me or some-
gang of youths surrounded her car, body would come to help. But all of the
demanded to know if she'd come from onlookers ... they were just out to watch."

New state manjuana laws concern officials

CHOICES
Continued from Page 1
"It's not clear what it adds up to,
which suggests that the president hasn't
quite determined in his own mind just
what the foreign_
policy of a second
Clinton term will
be," said Richard A
Haas, who served
on the National
Security Council
staff during the'>
Bush administra-
tion. "One sees in
these people a host4
of tendencies, and Cohen
as a result it's hard
to know what the bottom line is."
Stephen Hess, a scholar at the
Brookings Institution, said, "In the pol-
icy point of view, it doesn't suggest that
he (Clinton) has a world view. It does-
n't suggest that he's going to break new
ground. He's picked people who do not
have global views, who are not strate-
gic, long-term thinkers."
Clinton long has prized collegiality
among his top advisers, and the selection
of his second-term Cabinet continues the
path he blazed four years ago in putting
together teams of people, rather than

simply filling vacancies one by one.
Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake and
Samuel "Sandy" Berger represent
known quantities not only to Clinton but
also even more so to each other.
Throughout the 1980s they worked
together as part of a government-in-wait-
ing, advising Democratic presidential can-
didates and wrestling with the shape of a
post-Vietnam policy for their party. All
three proved themselves to be immensely
loyal to Clinton in his first term as part o
a team that included Warren Christopher
as secretary of state and William "~iyas
secretary of defense.
The term was notable for the lack o
tension and bureaucratic infighting that
marked the national security teams in
both the Reagan and Carter administra-
tions, and the president appeared deter-
mined not to fall off track during the
next four years.
It is striking that among the people
under consideration for the national
security team, those with reputations
for abrasiveness, partisanship or prickly
independence - former assistant sec-
retary of state Richard Holbrooke, for-
mer Senate majority leader George
Mitchell (D-Maine), retiring Sen. Sam
Nunn (D-Ga.) and CIA director John
Deutch - came out losers in the com-
petition for the top jobs.

The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Federal and state officials are
struggling to respond to new marijuana laws in
California and Arizona that critics say are so loosely
written that even people suffering from sinus
headaches could legally possess the drug.
Daily Washington strategy sessions only have pro-
duced a whiff of desperation as these officials attempt to
deal with the ballot initiatives, which legalize the med-
ical use of marijuana. At the same time, advocates of the
new laws, which were decisively approved last month,
fear they will lose public backing as some fringe sup-
porters openly campaign for the drug to be legalized.
Shortly before Election Day, some federal officials
threatened to arrest doctors and other caregivers who
recommend marijuana for their patients, but now

tough talk has given way to cautious pronouncements
and rare admissions of bewilderment.
While promising a "strong federal response" at a
Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week, retired
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, chief of the White House drug
policy office, said he is "trying to puzzle through, in
coisultation with state authorities, what a responsible
wry to move ahead is." McCaffrey said in an interview
Wednesday that he is working with four Cabinet
departments and expects to make recommendations to
President Clinton by Christmas.
State officials are also in a quandary over the conflict
between federal anti-marijuana laws and the ballot ini-
tiatives, under which medical necessity can be used to
just ify the possession of marijuana and - in the case of
Arizona - such drugs as heroin and LSD. The

California measure, for example, makes it legal for any-
one to possess marijuana on the basis of a doctor's "rec-
ommendation"-- which does not need to be written -
that the drug will provide relief for a medical condition.
The proposition exempts patients and "defined care-
givers" who possess or cultivate marijuana from state
criminal laws governing the narcotic plant. It also allows
physicians to recommend its use in the treatment of can-
cer, AIDS, anorexia, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma,
arthritis, migraine or "any other illness for which mari-
juana provides relief."
Many doctors believe marijuana can help treat peo-
ple with cancer and AIDS. Starting in the 1970s, stud-
ies have shown that oral doses of marijuana's major
active ingredient, THC, alleviated the nausea and
vomiting caused by chemotherapy.

U I

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