Guns are silent now, but ingrained hatreds live on in Northern Ireland
Sam McBride, Sunday Independent, June 23rd, 2024
A fortnight ago, I was on my way to play football in a Belfast leisure centre where I've played for 15 years when something happened that I've never experienced before. Three young boys aged no more than 10 started chanting at me: "Up the Ra”. After initial bewilderment, I quickly realised it was because I was wearing an old England cricket top.
I tried to explain I'd bought it when Ed Joyce, one of the greatest ever Irish batsmen, had become the first Irishman in modern times to play for England, then the only route for an Irishman to play Test cricket. They weren't interested in the complexity of what the legendary Don Bradman described as the "game of glorious uncertainties”. Presumably thinking me English, they shouted all the louder until I walked away.
It was an unsettling experience. These were youngsters no older than my own children, so I didn't feel threatened, yet it was depressing to see children born so long after the end of the Troubles chanting support for a group that slaughtered the innocent.
Some people think because Northern Ireland is now peaceful this is harmless — the equivalent of football supporters screaming abuse at each other at a match then sharing the train home. It's not. Even in the sunshine of post-Troubles Northern Ireland, there is the omnipresent shadow of darkness. For now, it is mercifully faint, but only the most historically ignorant would dismiss the potential for what starts as children taught to hate ending in savagery.
Plenty of people in Northern Ireland scarcely even comprehend their own deep prejudices. Indeed, there is a conceit that those of us who have lived most of our lives since the Good Friday Agreement are almost immune to the barbarity of our ancestors.
This arrogance is not new; history records myriad cycles of bloodshed between which there has often been the sense that this time things are different and what has gone before is now unthinkable. Each time, that hope has given way to butchery.
Once the killing starts, there is what the late Belfast psychologist Professor Ed Cairns described as a "welling up of deep unconscious forces” where fear and folk history fuel a seemingly unstoppable cycle of murder and retribution. As someone who plans to spend the rest of my life in Belfast, and who remembers the final years of the Troubles, I hope my children will grow old in a Northern Ireland where that deadly cycle has for ever been broken. But hoping isn't enough.
Three weeks ago, a yacht sailed into Portballintrae harbour on the north Antrim coast. It's a sleepy holiday village brimming with the second homes of Belfast's upper middle-classes. Within hours, the boat's owner, Conor Costello, had lost the vessel, which was also his home, after it was burnt, seemingly because it was flying the Irish flag. He feared for his life and is now homeless after what the PSNI described as "a sectarian hate crime”.
Yet that's one of the constant low-level sectarian attacks that will never make the history books and that to many people in Northern Ireland is just an accepted, if regrettable, fact of life.
Breaking such deeply ingrained prejudice will never be easy, but part of it has to involve taking personal responsibility for actions that, when viewed objectively, are indefensible.
Two weeks ago, former UDA man David Adams did something that almost never happens — he admitted what he had done as a paramilitary was wrong and he had no justification for it. In a brutally honest article for The Irish Times, he said people who know him yet pass silently in the street are "wholly justified” in their attitude because he was once an apologist for killers.
He reflected: "The vast majority of young people in Northern Ireland, on both sides, regardless of personal experience, upbringing, intellect and whether they were endowed with common sense, were able to retain a clear enough sense of decency to steer well clear of paramilitaries. I wasn't.”
Looking back on what he had done, he said: "I am thoroughly ashamed of it and regrets are never too far away… Do I apologise for my past? Yes, unreservedly.”
Shane Paul O'Doherty, the Derry- born former IRA bomber, is another former paramilitary who has publicly repented of actions he can now clearly see as immoral.
Such public self-reflection takes a courage that is all too rare. Far easier to brag about playing a role in "the war” or to slur innocent victims in an attempt to salve conscience — or to say nothing at all.
Last Saturday, Adams addressed a Belfast rally organised by Ireland's Future, which is lobbying for a border poll. He did so after comments in this newspaper last year when he expressed himself open to Irish unity. This is no closed-minded bigot. But his message to the rally was blunt. He told the organisation, which is seen as close to Sinn Féin, that it is dangerously downplaying the need for reconciliation in Northern Ireland and underestimating the potential for violence if Irish unity is bungled.
He asked: "Does anyone seriously believe two million unreconciled northerners can be injected into the political and social bloodstream of the progressive, liberal democracy to the south of us, and everything will be fine?”
He urged republicans not to see reconciliation as some sort of unionist Trojan horse to delay Irish unity, but as desperately necessary if those of us now alive are to play our part in breaking the hatreds that now live on, even as the guns are silent.
Leo Varadkar told the same rally that republicans should make a "stronger, specific apology for what was done” by the IRA, something he said could "help to change hearts and minds”.
The irony is that if that happened, it would probably make Irish unity easier by helping to persuade some of the centrist voters who will decide a future border poll. But more importantly it would also maybe mean that children might be less likely to chant about killers in the face of a stranger.
