"Merry Christmas"

In one of the loneliest, darkest spots of Phoenix Park, Dublin, near the place where a granite monument to the Duke of Wellington stands and about a mile from the Island Bridge barracks, the Army of Eire maintains one of its major arsenals. One night last fortnight a man dressed in an Eire Army uniform approached the arsenal gates, remarked that the parcel he carried was a Christmas gift to the commanding officer.

The unsuspecting sentries saluted, returned a "Merry Christmas," hastened to unlock the gates. Scarcely were they opened before out of the dark appeared other men, not in Army uniforms, who held guns rather than parcels in their hands. Without a shot fired, the arsenal's guard was disarmed. Four official-looking lorries soon drove into the arsenal, and before the Island Bridge barracks knew what was up. the trucks, loaded with 1,000,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, had made their getaway.

Neither police nor Army had much difficulty in identifying the holdup men as members of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, the band of Eire patriot-terrorists whose program is to sever the few remaining ties with Great Britain and unite Northern Ireland with Eire. Last week 16 of those accused of the robbery were caught, and about 700,000 rounds of the missing ammunition were found in various hideouts. Eire's Army and police were scared that the I. R. A., its fire power thus reinforced, would attempt a coup d'etat either in Eire or in neighboring Northern Ireland, the six Protestant-dominated counties stanchly loyal to Great Britain.

For Prime Minister Eamon de Valera of Eire, renewed I. R. A. activity was bad news. No one has insisted more emphatically that Eire and Northern Ireland should be one nation, nor has he been anything but independent of Great Britain. Last week, in a radio broadcast to the U. S. in which he urged that peace in Europe be negotiated now, Mr. de Valera slipped in a request for U. S. moral support "to our efforts to have the partition of our country immediately brought to an end." But most embarrassing to the Prime Minister would be a violent attempt of the I. R. A. to oust British rule from Northern Ireland. No Government of Eire could ever cooperate with the British Gov ernment in putting down an Irish rebel lion, no matter how much it despised I. R. A.'s terroristic program, and noncooperation would lose Eire valuable British good will.

About all worried "Dev" could do was call the Dail (Chamber of Deputies) to meet this week and give the police wider powers to arrest and detain suspects. The latest outburst of I. R. A. terror ism dates from Dec. 14, when two young Irishmen were sentenced to death in England at the Birmingham Assizes, for planting bombs at Coventry.

Most spectacular I. R. A. activity took place in Londonderry Jail in Northern Ireland. There, 45 imprisoned Irishmen closed their section of the prison and proceeded to set their bedding afire and smash the furniture. A crowd soon gathered outside, while the men inside sang Irish Republican songs, shouted Republican slogans and displayed Republican flags and placards out of the windows. One placard read: "England is the champion of freedom. Is this freedom?"

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