In Northern Ireland, Cabdrivers Fear the Next Fare May Be a Hitman

BELFAST, Northern Ireland —  “Driving a taxi’s not a crime,” Paddy Clarke said as he piloted his black taxi up Antrim Road in north Belfast, stopping to rescue Catholics from the drenching rain.

“I’m an Irishman and make no apology for it,” he said. “If the loyalists look on me as the enemy, there’s nothin’ I can do. I’m an easy target, and they know where to find me.”

A few weeks later, gunmen burst into the 52-year-old cabby’s living room and killed him.

Driving a cab in Northern Ireland is a peculiarly dangerous trade.

Most of the nearly 100 taxi companies in Belfast are identified with specific neighborhoods. Each can safely serve only one side of the sectarian divide: Catholic-operated cabs in “republican” areas and Protestant ones in “loyalist” districts.

As a result, cabdrivers have become targets of the violence that plagues the British province. Six were killed last year, all of them Catholics.

On March 10, a 30-year-old Catholic driver was severely wounded in a Protestant area of southeast Belfast. He was on his daily run to pick up a disabled child when loyalists shot him twice in the neck and four times in the back.

The Ulster Freedom Fighters and the Ulster Volunteer Force, two outlawed loyalist gangs, claim after each operation that their targets were members or sympathizers of the Irish Republican Army. Police sources believe that the gunmen, based in the Protestant community, simply go after Catholics.

Alex Attwood, a City Council member for the Catholic-based Social Democratic and Labor Party, has renewed his party’s call for the British government to let taxis operate without visible insignia.

He said loyalists “will hit a Catholic taxi driver if they can get to him.” Referring to the murder of five people in a Belfast betting shop on Feb. 5, he said the loyalists “attack the most easily identified Catholics.”

Last year, the British government agreed to permit a generic “taxi” sign atop the cars, but it requires cabbies to wear badges and other identification.

The shooting March 10 stunned the victim’s firm, City Cab, one of the largest in Belfast. The company is based in the relatively neutral Queen’s University area, and none of its drivers had ever been attacked.

“In City Cab, it never mattered whether you were Protestant or Roman Catholic,” said a Protestant driver, who asked not to be identified.

“It’s not just the fact that a co-worker and friend is shot, which is bad enough,” he said. “It’s that, particularly the Roman Catholic drivers are asking themselves: ‘Who set him up? And am I next? “

Two cab associations that operate parallel services on the most polarized main streets have been prominent targets.

West Belfast Taxi Assn., with a fleet of 250 black cabs, works the Falls Road and Catholic nationalist enclaves in north Belfast. The taxis of the North Belfast Mutual Assn., also black, cover the Protestant territory of Shankill Road and Shore Road.

Both associations support prisoners welfare groups, and many of their drivers are paroled members of paramilitary groups. The British government claims that the two cab associations are financial fronts for terrorism, but it has not produced firm evidence.

Loyalists have killed three West Belfast Taxi drivers in eight months, including Clarke.

“I know I’m a target,” said Jim Neeson, chairman of the cab company, whose office has steel security doors, bulletproof glass and surveillance cameras.

Last July, when the Ulster Volunteer Force shot driver Thomas (Toddler) Hughes, Neeson rushed to the hospital but was detained by police.

“They thought it was quite funny that I should be in such a hurry to see somebody that was dead,” he said.

IRA gunmen killed a driver in October, 1990, in front of the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, and last fall they blew the legs off another man in the loyalist Sandy Row district with an under-car bomb. After the second attack, the IRA admitted that it got the wrong man.

Republican splinter groups have made several attacks on Protestant cabs, particularly the loyalist black taxis.

In June, 1991, the Irish People’s Liberation Organization wounded Eddie McIlwaine, a paroled member of the Shankill Butchers, as he sat behind the wheel of his black cab.

On March 13, a member of the Irish National Liberation Army shot a Protestant driver when he pulled up to a railway station.

For a Belfast cabby, each call is a risk, perhaps a trap.

John O’Hara, driving for Regal Taxis last April, answered one to the lower Lisburn Road, a rough Protestant area close enough to Queen’s University to have become deceptively “mixed.” Ulster Freedom Fighters gunmen cut him down.

“We get calls like that all the time from outside the district--tough calls,” said one of O’Hara’s co-workers, who did not want his name used.

“You can’t tell someone’s religion over the phone, and you can’t turn away too many customers either. You have to make a living.

“Still, in the back of your mind,” he said, “you’re thinking that this ‘customer’ might be your executioner.”