A NATION OF VICTIMS? Northern Ireland's two minorities and their common future
Lennon, Brian
A NATION OF VICTIMS? Northern Ireland's two minorities Brian Lennon Hast year, speaking to a group of Catholic high-school students in Omagh, a small country town in Northern Ireland, I put...
...A solution that is either exclusively British or exclusively Irish cannot work, because the other side has the power to veto it...
...I am not discussing the morality of that fact, but simply using it to show the strength-despite all the strains- of the American myth...
...For their part, Unionists are incensed at all the attention given to Bloody Sunday...
...And there are plenty of other issues to reinforce his sense of victimhood...
...Where is it...
...But the model of an independent nation state is highly problematic in the context of two opposed minorities...
...On Northern Ireland we have yet to come up with an alternative to the traditional nation state...
...I said...
...Together with other evidence-all available to Widgery- this suggested that the soldiers of the First Parachute Regiment, who said they acted in response to gunfire, were in fact correct: another British unit was also firing into the crowd...
...In most countries the unifying myth emerged from a historical struggle for independence...
...Northern Ireland's two minorities Brian Lennon Hast year, speaking to a group of Catholic high-school students in Omagh, a small country town in Northern Ireland, I put forward the view that the Irish conflict was not a colonial one...
...Of the 3,000 people killed since 1968, over 60 percent died at the hands of Nationalist paramilitaries...
...There may or may not be...
...They too have been victims...
...Not having lost any fields myself, it was an easy question for me...
...While we have a common language, English (although a minority speak Gaelic out of commitment), it is not something people have had to struggle over in this century...
...We have found some of the ingredients: any future government must involve players from both sides...
...for them, "justice" means righting their wrongs...
...They know that the IRA is made up of Catholics, not Protestants...
...In our case the struggle for independence was against each other...
...None of the soldiers was ever charged and their commander was awarded an Order of the British Empire later that year...
...If language and religion are unlikely to be our main iden-tity carriers, we are left with the task of forging a new con-stitution to play this role...
...The British failed to respond adequately to their initiative, in part because they were suspicious of IRA intentions...
...The Preamble to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement is full of aspirations to-ward reconciliation...
...America" is a myth for which people will kill and die...
...They suspect that Catholics do what their priests tell them...
...Just as the Nationalists are a minority within Northern Ireland, so the Unionists are a minority within Ireland as a whole...
...For him it is difficult to an-swer...
...These policy details do not begin to provide an overar-ching myth...
...This is not to say that there is no field in reality...
...The British "robbed our land," he said...
...They don't know what goes on inside, because they won't go in to find out...
...It took me many years of dialogue to under-stand this perception...
...In the Irish case, each group is strong enough to be able to withstand the other...
...It is critical that after the coming election the new British government get back into the driver's seat and take the ini-tiative in seeking another ceasefire...
...What then could be the basis of a new myth...
...And for that we need new myths...
...The last IRA ceasefire, in August 1994, was a very difficult move for Republicans...
...Very often there is no way of finding out...
...I asked...
...In Northern Ireland, it is a Na-tionalist word, so much so that one is unlikely to get agree-ment to use it in joint ecumenical statements...
...Which land...
...The Widgery inquiry and the per-sistent refusal since of successive British governments to allow a new investigation confirmed the belief of many Nationalists that due process in a British system of justice is not possi-ble...
...Right now, many of us have given up on religion altogeth-er...
...This has set a framework that limits the conflict...
...Their decision to end vi-olence suggested they were moving toward a new analysis...
...Again the hand waved, but no words came out...
...Catholic churches are large...
...They see it as a monolithic structure dedicated to overthrowing Protestantism...
...The key change of the past fifteen years is that the British and Irish governments have agreed on the double minority analysis and on the need for reconciliation...
...While there are still frequent difficul-ties between the two governments, the Republic is now consulted on major issues by the British government...
...this in turn means taking things away from Unionists...
...Widgery accepted the statements of the soldiers, all of whom claimed to have been firing at bombers or snipers...
...Where is the field that you lost...
...Recipients of Sinn Fein e-mail get reams on British and Unionist injustices, but when it comes to the IRA they are told only about successful or unsuccessful "operations" against British occupation forces, as if the IRA were made up of deft hospital surgeons...
...In this case Nationalist perceptions of injustice are accu-rate...
...They have been moving geographically toward the northeast...
...He lifted his right hand and pointed over his shoulder toward the fields out-side the window...
...That is what I mean when I say that Unionists as well as Nationalists are a minority...
...We have no future if we keep on killing each other...
...I hope my high-school friend from Omagh gives up his dream about his field...
...We came to the island in successive groups: as Firbolgs, Celts, Normans- many of whom became Old English, as Elizabethan or Jacobite Planters...
...we need new structures of polic-ing and an on-the-ground commitment to fair employment...
...So Unionists respond to Bloody Sunday by asking: Why do people make so much fuss about what may have been an "overreaction" by the British army on one occasion, and ignore the long line of IRA atrocities...
...Perhaps the answer is the effort involved to build a peaceful society that respects legitimate diversity...
...Many of us also changed our religious de-nomination: from Roman Catholic to Anglican or to one of the Protestant denominations, and sometimes back again...
...Finally, I asked my high-school friend, "When are you going to let go of that field...
...we need North-South cooperative bodies in areas like tourism that will market the island as a whole for the economic ben-efit of all...
...Rather it was rooted in the fact that there are two minori-ties in Ireland, one Catholic and one Protestant...
...When Protestants come out of a Sunday service, they do not notice the other small Protestant groups...
...And next to the northeast is the Irish Sea...
...He couldn't name the field because the field was a myth in his head...
...Over the past 300 years, Protestants in Ireland as a whole have gradually lost power, status, and prestige...
...has no written con-stitution...
...That was a pity...
...While no one should be naive about the IRA, if it offers an end to violence (even if this does not include hand-ing over weapons, or ending punishment beatings), the IRA should be taken at its word: if it breaks its word it will be even more isolated politically-provided the British gov-ernment does not continue to mishandle issues such as Bloody Sunday...
...It should be relatively easy for North Americans to relate to minority problems-with all the civil rights issues these raise-but in the Irish case the difficulty is compounded by nationalism...
...Our only future lies together...
...He sees himself as a victim and reads history to rein-force that image...
...One of these is "justice...
...McClean found that some of the victims had been shot by bullets traveling in a downward direction...
...Our immediate need, however, is an end to violence...
...A government-appointed inquiry headed by Lord Chief Justice Widgery chose to admit as evidence only 15 out of 700 eye-witness accounts...
...That is one difference between our conflict and that of the Israelis and Palestinians: many Palestinians still have the keys of the homes from which their families were expelled in the late 1940s in what is now Israel...
...What could constitute a parallel in the Irish context...
...government to protect them from the IRA...
...And that is my hope: that shortly we will together face the task of constitution building for a new kind of nation state: one with two minorities linked to both Britain and the Republic of Ireland within the context of the European Union...
...What was fascinating during the last ceasefire was the extent to which Nationalists and Unionists wanted to meet each other, to find out about the other side's life and values, to celebrate what they have in common...
...Each side has good reasons for its sense of victimhood...
...He decided not to call Dr...
...Finally, Unionists want to be part of the U.K.-that is what defines them...
...we need a bill of rights (the U.K...
...But I hope he will be able to replace it with a better one: to rear his children in peace and har-mony with his Protestant neighbors whose ancestors came to the island before colonists came to America...
...I finally began to understand it through an image: Protestant churches tend to be small and numer-ous...
...In December, the British failed once again to respond to an IRA offer of a ceasefire, mediated by John Hume, M.P., head of the Social Democratic and Labour Party...
...We Irish have no keys to our fields, because we are a mongrel race...
...In his report, Widgery implied that some of those killed had been handling weapons, a claim later denied by British Prime Minister John Major...
...Nationalists have successfully presented themselves internationally as victims...
...At the end, one of the students asked when I was going to catch on: the conflict was clearly colonial...
...At the same time, they resent the dependent position in which this leaves them...
...In a population of about 1 million Unionists, there is hardly a family that has not suf-fered a bereavement...
...The British army shot and killed thirteen unarmed people in Deny...
...What com-mon struggle could bind us together...
...we need an ethos of reconciliation involving both forgiveness and apology...
...Raymond McClean, who had been appointed by Cardinal Conway to attend the postmortems...
...In a very real sense, the Unionist community has its back to the water...
...and religion, despite our common Christianity, is still only a means of unity with-in each minority...
...Instead they see the very large Catholic church and the great numbers who worship there...
...Furthermore, many Unionists fear the Catholic church...
...But many Nationalists remain blind to injustices car-ried out against others by members of their own community...
...Bloody Sunday, 1972, is an example...
...Traditionally their analysis has been that the conflict was a colonial one and the solution was to re-move the British through violence...
...Nationalism can act as a carrier of identity...
...They need the U.K...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 5
