"H-Block is a festering sore... A

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Mary-Ar Ireland. It and those responsible for it must be smashed.

•We here are helpless. All we have to give is our lives. We simply ask you tory for Owen Carron.

Only the Daily Star and the Telegraph reported how the children were reduced to tears, but every paper reported the Paisleyite councillors view that the tears conveyed the real meaning of terrorism.

Blatant

This crude propaganda was just the most blatant example of a battle which has been raging in the press throughout the run-up to the Fermanagh-South Tyrone byelection.

A number of close studies of the injuries and agonies of wounded soldiers have appeared. The Northern Ireland Office issued and had published their own "criminalised" pen portraits of the hunger strikers.

Angry stories appeared about the slowness of the British army to agree compensation for the widows of We or re. 8,00r4. --FE governanca change i's mind him.

Gerry Adams of Si inn Fein on hi recent H Bic ack visit said to the strikr ers, "you coutd all be de iad. Everyone left in this ro om when we leave will be dead."

The strikers said ti hey knew that (and since th ien, in less than a month, fi our of them have died).

They said they w tere all continuing, not out : of personal loyalty to the other dead strikers; not out of loyalty to tl heir friends now on strike but because "there was no alternative, five yi Bars is it we don't get the five demands then the rest : of the boys and women wi "We're right, the Bri tish government is wrong an id if they think they can br 'eak us they're wrong twice.' the dead soldiers.

But sections of the press are now gripped by war weariness. The Sunday Times - previously a firm opponent of making concessions - has for two weeks running published major editorials calling for a date to be set for withdrawal.

Even the Daily Mail and the Telegraph have included in otherwise standard editorials hints that the government could do a deal over the H Blocks.

The election of Sands and now Carron has robbed the press of its most frequent war-cry - that the Provisionals have no popular support.

Only the Times - after rehearsing all the arguments in favour of giving way -stuck firmly to the Thatcher line. Its editorial said winning the demands would be a "more solid political asset than the passing sympathy of mourners.

Movement

"It is by convincing their constituency that they are bound to win that insurrectionary groups make the qualitative leap from being a conspiracy to leading a movement."

But the Guardian which has no trace of liberalism on Ireland - said "There is no issue of principle on the government's side which is worth the gathering momentum of paramilitary alienation of opinion, misinformed no doubt but influential, in the United States and elsewhere abroad."

The children's visit to Livingstone showed the SAS side of Flost Street, still up to its dirty tricks; but the despair creeping into the leader columns shows that the staft officers are losine faith in their generals.

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to do your share and prevent tragedy."

protest was too much." "They won't break u

politics. There is no issue of principle which is worth the