Martina Devlin: North moved on but we didn't take leap of faith
Fairytales are comforting because what happens during them is fixed: evil is thwarted, while the virtuous are tested but pass with flying colours. History, on the other hand, is troubling because it can be difficult to assign hero and villain labels.
We are most comfortable with the kind of history where there is consensus: the rats that carried bubonic plague, the assassin who was the spark plug for World War One. But when confronted with an alternative version of events we grow uneasy -- and some seek to defend the narrative they feel safest with, no matter how unsustainable.
One such threadbare account holds that the Irish state was founded as a result of 'good' violence from 'patriotic' gunmen acting with the support of the people. The Troubles in the North, on the other hand, were characterised by 'bad' violence from 'terrorist' gunmen acting without any support from the people.
These storylines suggest that resistance to foreign rule by violent means is acceptable in the Republic but unacceptable in the North. Why? Apparently there are two crucial differences: the passage of time -- bloodshed 90 years ago can be stomached but not bloodshed in living memory -- and Sinn Fein's electoral success in 1918, which was deemed to ratify the Rising retrospectively.
In both cases, key figures from those bloody times entered government. History is nothing if not repetitive. Less predictable was the seismic shift made by people in the North at the time of the Good Friday Agreement. They rejected the world view of themselves as two warring tribes locked into an ancient conflict, and parked how they felt about some of the names connected with the Troubles.
It didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen without soul-searching and teeth-grinding. But it happened.
People in the Republic watched that seismic shift, but I now see they didn't grasp the enormity of the journey being undertaken; how minds opened and the baggage of the past was thrown overboard. A leap of faith was enacted, a tremendous act of reconciliation on both sides.
South of the Border, there was a sigh of relief that civil war no longer raged on the doorstep, making Ireland look barbaric internationally. Politicians could forget about the North, drive back to Leinster House and start making representations on behalf of developers and steering the economy over a cliff.
Belatedly, 13 years on, a realisation is dawning about the scale of that cultural shift. The catalyst is Martin McGuinness's entry into the presidential race. His candidacy allows people to see what leaving the past behind means in practice.
Oddly, the population affected daily by violence has learned to live with sidelining the past, whereas the population less affected by it is scandalised at being asked to do likewise.
What does that reveal about mindsets in the Republic? In 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing' Seamus Heaney refers to minds "as open as a trap" ie, with only the appearance of openness when the opposite is true.
Northerners are looking on with bemusement at reaction to McGuinness during the presidential campaign. They are bewildered to see it is only now occurring to their neighbours that a peace process culminates in bygones becoming bygones. Literally. It can't simply be a form of words.
From the cushioned vantage point of 90 years on, events leading to the formation of the Irish state are regarded with tranquillity. There is no denunciation of violence. A fairytale version has been composed that includes a degree of pride that a tiny country took on the mighty British empire.
Much has been airbrushed from the picture. Casualties include the origins of Northern Ireland, and any responsibility the Republic might bear for the people classifying themselves as Irish within that state. Up there has nothing to do with down here. Up there is Timbuctu.
Indeed, the Troubles were a convenient excuse for people in the Republic to say: "A plague o' both your houses." It allowed them to ignore discrimination that was institutional, systemic, self-reinforcing. It licensed the conclusion, still in vogue, that Catholic grievances were exaggerated; and anyhow the civil rights campaign settled everything before the IRA campaign.
Just to be clear, I don't endorse violence. Gandhi put it best: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." But why did a sizeable section of the nationalist community support the IRA, even tacitly? Why did the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, achieve sweeping electoral success? Any attempt to suggest an explanation is received as legitimisation of violence. This suffocates debate and impedes understanding of our history.
In the preceding half-century, any IRA campaign in the northern counties petered out from lack of support. This changed in the 1970s, not because everyone in the nationalist community wanted a united Ireland but because they wanted equality. The state that governed them was ducking its responsibility to provide it -- Britain stood by when unionists collapsed power-sharing in 1974 after an experiment of a few months.
Let's not re-fashion history into sanitised stories. Let's not pretend discrimination had vanished by the early 1970s. It took decades to root it out.
"Once a colonial system is established historically, those in the superior position seek to monopolise basic resources. In this process, prejudice becomes institutionalised; that is, it becomes embedded in the norms (regulations and informal rules) in a variety of social, economic and political organisations." That's the conclusion of academics Knowles and Prewitt in 'Institutional Racism in America' -- principles just as applicable closer to home.
Unionists had no overarching ill-will toward nationalists, but they were not prepared to take issue with a system operating to their advantage. Individuals had no need to discriminate -- institutionally, it was done for them.
Legislation has changed that but it happened slowly. It was 1989 before employment laws were strengthened, with the Fair Employment Act putting the onus on employers to monitor the religious composition of the workplace.
The desire to assign blame for the conflict remains strong in the Republic, and McGuinness is on the receiving end of that. In the North, however, people have reached an agreement to treat each other with courtesy and justice -- even if one section self-defines as Irish and the other as British.
The fairytales have been put away.
- Martina Devlin
Irish Independent
