SNIPPET: Per author Bryan HODGSON, "National Geographic" magazine senior staff member, in an article on Ireland in the April 1981 issue: "Time was when Ulster Presbyterianism found it difficult to live with England. Chafing under British trade restrictions and bitterly resentful of the special privileges and powers of the British-ruled Church of Ireland, more than 200,000 of them sailed to the United States between 1718 and 1775. Entire congregations took ship, and many of them wound up on the Appalachian frontier, where they battled Indians instead of Irish rebels. Later, they and their Scotch-Irish descendants played a prominent part in the American Revolution. At least four signers of the Declaration of Independence were of Ulster stock. The declaration itself was first printed by John DUNLAP, who learned his trade in a printshop in Strabane, 12 miles south of Londonderry. The American Revolution, and the French Revolution that followed, inspired many Protestants who stayed behind. They helped foment (incite) the abortive anti-British uprising of 1798. Its failure destroyed the liberal movement in the north, and destroyed Protestant and Catholic unity as well. In 1914, when Britain's Parliament passed a home-rule bill that gave self-government to Ireland, thousands of members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, armed with smuggled rifles, were ready to fight the British to remain under British rule. And British troops mutinied when ordered to disband the UVF. Only the beginning of World War I averted a constitutional crisis. In 1916 more than 5,000 Ulster Volunteers were killed at the Battle of the Somme (northern France) -- an enduring testimony that Ulster Protestants took loyalism seriously indeed. After the Irish revolution of 1919-21, Belfast's ghettos became bloody battlefields. And when the civil-rights movement was born on a wave of 1960s idealism, it ignited the passions of a recent past. In Londonderry - or Derry, as Irishmen prefer to call it, I met a Catholic named Pat DEVINE, who in 1979 also happened to be the mayor - a combination inconceivable in the years when a Protestant minority ruled the city by ruthlessly gerrymandering the majority Catholic vote. A decade ago Northern Ireland abolished the existing town council and ordered a voting system that assured proportional representation. Thus the Catholic majority can automatically retain the mayoralty. 'But we don't,' Mayor DEVINE said, 'We alternate with the protestant parties. They've got to have a part in decision making. We know what it's like to be powerless.' Nothing in Londonderry's history made it a likely testing ground for reconciliation. Its fortress walls were built in 1619 to resist rebellious Irishmen, and in 1689 the Protestant inhabitants withstood a 105-day siege by the Catholic army of James II - a feat that earned the title of Maiden City for the handsome little town on the River Foyle's banks. On marshy ground beneath the walls, a Catholic community called Bogside became a ready target for Protestant jeers each year during parades commemorating the siege. In August 1969 the Bogsiders reacted to the insults, triggering violence that set off the massive riots in Belfast. In 1972 the city won a different sort of fame when Catholic crowds demonstrate against the internment without trial of hundreds of terrorist suspects. British paratroopers opened fire, killing 13 men and youths. That Bloody Sunday caused more rioting throughout the north. Bombs shattered the Guildhall, seat of city government, and military roadblocks made Londonderry once again a city under siege. New changes, new hopes -- When I meet him, Mayor DEVINE - a joiner by trade - was surveying with satisfaction the results of a seven-million-dollar restoration of the Guildhall. Under a Catholic working majority, the city's tensions have eased. Many of the roadblocks are gone. new housing estates financed by Britain have liberated most Catholics from the Bogside slums. Equal employment opportunities in new textile mills have helped reduce the discrimination that for decades forced Catholic workers to emigrate. And IRA violence has diminished. 'We hope we've drawn support away from the terrorists by giving people something they CAN support, ' Mayor DEVINE said. 'And we're proving that the people of Ireland - Protestant and Catholic - can learn to live together.' ... The editor of the Washington D. C. magazine, Wilbur E. GARRETT, however, pointed out that as they were preparing to go to press new violence had broken out. "For 12 years the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland has been like a black hole, drawing in and devouring every material hope of ending it. It seems immune to the normal processes of negotiation, arbitration, and political compromise. Hatred and the urge for vengeance are passed along, lives are staked upon loyalities, and a web of economic and religious differences ensnares all participants. To the rest of the world it is also a strange struggle, for it takes place in enlightened and prosperous northwest Europe ... Yet there is wide interest in the world for the end of this agony. The Irish emigrants who went out to the United States, Canada, Australia, and other parts of the world have had an impact upon their adopted lands. Their descendants do not want to look back upon Ireland in sorrow and shame. .. The question now is whether murderous events will again outflank this movement, as it seems they are calculated to do. We join the hopes of others that it will not be so."