What to think about Northern Ireland
Bowman, David J.
What to think about Northern Ireland DAVID J. BOWMAN Many have tried and failed to find a useful comparison that would help Americans to understand better the conflict in Northern Ireland....
...Not an inch" has been a majority catchword...
...The people there habitually speak of each other in these terms, giving the media ample excuse for over-simplifying identification by using religious instead of political, numerical, or ethnic terms...
...Use violence as the means to the goal...
...Anything can happen, not much of it good...
...Love your enemy" seems preached only at funerals...
...To return to the metaphor...
...How much in common have they with ghetto-fighters in our appalling inner cities . . . except the color of their skin...
...Will they invade a majority ghetto and provoke a shooting war in the streets...
...What political wisdom do they have...
...Not an inch" says the minority has no right to a voice in its own political life...
...I suspect that the idea that "Protestant" and "Catholic" should be described as two "religions" may well have come from Northern Ireland...
...The young, especially in poor areas, are brainwashed this way...
...Brits out" has been a minority catchword...
...Will Mr...
...polls taken in recent years indicate a growing majority in the U.K...
...as it commonly does in such cases, the church left to God the judgment as to the person's conscience...
...Four have died, four more have taken their places, four hundred may be ready to follow...
...Moral theologians say it is a form of suicide if death is intended, but not if it is used as a non-lethal protest against injustice...
...However, I would suggest that these hunger-strikes are immoral...
...Christianity is all too often compromised by the culture of the community...
...Certainly, political alternatives would be offered and sufficient time for the transition given...
...the paramilitary groups have recently formed a common War Council, outnumbering the minority paras by far...
...Impossible to say . . . and impossible to guess how many in the Maze prison are thieves and criminals, and how many are there because they signed statements only after "inhumane treatment...
...Thatcher's government could hold a referendum in the entire United Kingdom-not merely in Northern Ireland where such votes are a mere formality-on keeping the political link between Northern Ireland and the Crown...
...WHAT kind of conflict is it, then...
...Set up a total-island socialist state with the paramilitaries as the army and police...
...The attempts to assassinate President Reagan and Pope John Paul II remind us how fragile any society is in the 1980s, particularly that of Northern Ireland...
...Insisting that he was starving for "political status," he doomed himself-and must have known he would occasion violence...
...to live in a wider world...
...Keep all political power, achieved in "democratic" elections and promised by the Westminster government in 1949-a pledge that the link with Great Britain would remain unless a majority of voters in Northern Ireland declared against it...
...She is losing her savings, and wonders what she can do to relieve the situation-but cannot think of anything new...
...In the case of Northern Ireland, I think she (Great Britain) would then be delighted to get out, and force Northern Ireland to live in a wider world...
...She declared in 1949 that they would have it and she would stay there as long as the couple wanted her...
...After these deaths, a Mass was allowed, without paramilitary trappings inside the church...
...Relatives of prisoners from both communities have protested, as have clergy and some politicians...
...and the Republic, too, as soon as possible...
...The "son," the one-million political majority in Northern Ireland, in general wants to keep "mother" around, as the guarantee of their "British" or mainly "Protestant" or "Ulster" way of life...
...they prefer "British" or since 1972, "Ulster-people...
...A previous contributor to these pages, he is presently Secretary for Ministries ofthe Jesuit Conference in Washington, D.C...
...Now she is more and more worn out from helping around the house, and from the growing antagonism of her daughter-in-law...
...She would learn that the family advises her to leave the house to the pair and go live elsewhere...
...Who sends them out to stone and petrol bomb...
...no government has declared war...
...and the young...
...I hesitate to write this, but will do so...
...Their own faults add to the trouble between them...
...The "mother" would appeal to the extended family to take counsel about the young couple's predicament and her dissatisfaction...
...Certainly the first four hunger-strikers to die were not your all-Catholic, all-American types...
...Brits out" says that "coir onists" present there before the settlement of Jamestown in America have no right to remain in Northern Ireland...
...The "mother," Great Britain, set up the house in 1921 to satisfy the "son's" demand for a home of his own...
...Such a vote would force Northern Ireland politicians and power-brokers to work out a deal acceptable to the majority of each community...
...They do not accept "Northern Irish" as their identity, because to them the word "Irish" means Gaelic and Catholic...
...Destroy North-em Ireland as a statelet...
...They are clear, apt as slogans, and disguised as to the propaganda that they are...
...Perhaps a UN or EEC peace-keeping force would at last be invited in...
...Not their fault...
...Reginald Maudling, U.K...
...it brought together representatives from all political parties, north and south-and thereby proved something...
...It is much as if the Weathermen in the sixties said they were at war with the U.S.A...
...The two politico-religious communities in Northern Ireland are like a young couple living in the husband's mother's house...
...Paisley's rhetoric bring out the extralegal "law and order" forces...
...I breathed a sigh of relief, amid my shocked sorrow, when I heard the man who shot the pope was a Turk and not from Northern Ireland-much as I was relieved to hear young Hinckley was a middle-class white...
...Three one-dimensional approaches to a multi-dimensional conflict are dangerous, and dangerously misleading...
...The IRA, of course, have made their funeral processions and graveside orations into a ritual, standardized declaration of vengeance...
...I will suggest one "next step" that seems to me almost the only viable way forward at this juncture of conflicting and adamant interests...
...Probably a Bill of Rights in Northern Ireland would be needed...
...And what to think of the hunger-strike...
...Finally the daughter-in-law is fed up and says: "Either she goes, or I go on a rampage to get her out...
...The H-Block prison and the hunger strikes are much in the news...
...Use violence if threatened...
...The mother, of course, is Great Britain...
...The IRA's "war" is an unreal one...
...How estimate the greater woe...
...The street fighters appearing on the TV news are teen-agers, boys and girls, masked like "Halloweeners" but playing a deadly serious role- sometimes simply deadly...
...Is it mainly a religious conflict...
...My expectation is that the Vote of United Kingdom citizens would be overwhelmingly against the link...
...The fourteen dead on Bloody Sunday, or the fourteen burned to death in the La Mon Restaurant fire-bombing by the IRA...
...He could hardly have failed to realize that some such outrages would occur...
...It is an ancient Irish way of protest, with a symbolic relation to the Great Famine of the 1840s...
...We cannot anticipate what will happen in the next few weeks...
...from 1975 to 1979, now serves as a consultant on Ireland for the same organization...
...Similarly, the Ulster Freedom Fighters' tit-for-tat assassinations are' 'justified" by declaring war on the Provos...
...What to think of them...
...Over-severe sentences, brutal interrogators, forced confessions have been public knowledge long before the U.K.'s Bennett Commission itemized abuses...
...the United Kingdom has none now...
...No question about the abuses in arrest-trial-conviction procedures in the past...
...As always, the poor are the ones who suffer...
...That of the grieving mother of Bobby Sands, or of the mother of Constable Ellis who was killed by a booby-trap bomb on the day of Sands's funeral...
...Will the IRA go political, encouraged by their success in Fermanagh with Bobby Sands...
...Minister of State at the time, declared war on the IRA, so counter-violence is justified...
...In March, Glencree and Corrymeela Reconciliation Centers co-sponsored a symposium on possible political developments in Northern Ireland...
...No-but bad religion has had a lot to do with it...
...They live in segregated housing, attend segregated (because neighborhood) schools, and inherit bitterness from their parents...
...in favor of phasing out the Army and the financial subsidy for Northern Ireland...
...She has given them the house as a wedding gift, provided she can live there with them as long as she wishes...
...Britain could declare Northern Ireland to be more than a merely internal matter...
...Fifteen people died between March 1 and his death on May 5, most of them in connection with his fast...
...So much for "daughter-in-law...
...Or will the majority paramilitaries strike out on their own...
...to give the churches credit, forgiveness has usually been the theme of burial sermons, whether by Presbyterians as after the Bessbrook massacre or by Catholics at Bobby Sands's Mass...
...Undaunted, I shall try, relying on a metaphor I heard used by Rev...
...The Haves against the the Have-nots, the politically powerful against the weak, the poor of one "tribe" against the other's poor...
...Bobby Sands arid everyone else knew that "political status" would not be given by the British, although some individual demands might be met, like personal clothing and more visits...
...Maire Drumm shot in her hospital bed, or the young policewoman shot in her trailer while her three-year-old daughter hid behind her teddy-bear...
...Once you declare war, any violence seems logical, and innocents also die...
...They want to keep the power given to them in 1921, preserved by means of government-documented discrimination for fifty years, and threatened now by the Thatcher and Haughey governments' plans for a more cooperative relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland...
...They would accept "Northern Irish" as their identity, but prefer simply "Irish...
...They have loved and respected her, but time takes its toll as she "interferes" with their life and occasions much bickering over her presence...
...So much for "son...
...Some political directions have been proposed: a federal or confederal island, a larger "off-shore islands" confederacy, a six-county independent "Ulster...
...Part of the problem in the judicial process comes from the refusal of many of those arrested to recognize the court, and from intimidating threats to families of prospective witnesses...
...History had captured their young lives, and destroyed them...
...Will they (more likely, I am sorry to say) plan a "spectacular" killing like that of seventy-nine-year-old Lord Mountbatten in Donegal in 1979...
...The "daughter-in-law," the half-million political minority in Northern Ireland, wants "mother" out if she will not guarantee their civil rights in jobs, housing, security, and a share in political power as a minority...
...I suggest that this is a tragic case of claiming that the end justifies the means...
...In this sense, Northern Ireland is "Britain's Vietnam...
...Within the two communities, extremists thrive...
...the husband is the Loyalist community, and the wife, the Nationalist...
...Ray Davey, Presbyterian founder of Corrymeela Reconciliation Center in Bally castle, Northern Ireland...
...They want also in general to preserve their Gaelic and mainly Catholic way of life...
...father david i. bowman, S.J., director ofthe Ireland program in the Division of Overseas Ministries ofthe National Council of Churches of Christ in U.S.A...
...But all that would come only after the United Kingdom referendum, arid the "British decision to let the Northern Irish settle it themselves...
...few of them emigrate south, but rather choose Australia, New Zealand, or Canada-as do emigrants from the majority...
...Wee houses on the Protestant Shankill Road are as mean as the wee houses on the Catholic Falls Road...
...Not all of this is Roy Davey's but the basic idea is...
...By no means all of them want an end to the border...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 12
