INDEPTH: NORTHERN IRELAND
More Troubles
Gary Katz, CBC News Online | Updated December 8, 2004
And there was always an Irish Republican Army. For a decade after partition it violently agitated for reunification of Ireland using guns and bombs liberally. During the Second World War, though many internationally-minded Irishmen fought on the side of the Allies, the IRA openly supported the Nazi cause while Ireland, though officially neutral, permitted both German and Japanese agents into the country.
The IRA went completely underground after ultimately being outlawed by both Ireland and Northern Ireland, and, though responsible for bombs in both Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, and London during the 1950s, its activities waned considerably. The cycle of violence, the most recent round, started again in 1968.
It was the height of what we remember as the '60s. Protest riots simultaneously rocked and paralysed Paris, Russian troops put down Czech reformists, Chicago police clubbed students as cameras rolled for dinner-hour newscasts. And the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland rose up for civil rights. They were doubly incensed: victims of political and economic discrimination, and in their own land.
The Catholic population had grown after the war, largely through immigration from Ireland. The protests led to violence. Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, a Protestant and a liberal, had wanted to ease the anti-Catholic discrimination problem but was forced from power.
Thirty years of death and hatred followed in Northern Ireland, spilling over into England and Ireland. In 1969, troops came from Britain. That same year the IRA split into the "officials" who renounced violence, and the "provisionals" who embraced it as an acceptable tool for change. The Protestants produced their own terrorists, The Ulster Defense Association. In 1972, direct control of Northern Ireland was taken over by Britain and the Northern Irish parliament and constitution were suspended.
There have been acts on both sides since that seem indefensible even using the most extreme nationalist definitions. There have been many imprisonments in British jails, some clearly justified, some just as patently not. There have been acts and provocations that speak of a depth of hatred between neighbours that's unfathomable to most of us. Each summer, during "marching season" the Protestant majority rubs their Catholic neighbours' faces in the victory of the Protestant William at the Boyne, an event over 300 years in the past. Even though William was a Dutchman and the House of Orange a Dutch institution.
The reality is several centuries of hatred and disgust passed down to each new child, a culture in which belonging to one's group requires passionate and angry feelings about members of another. To the Irish, Northern Ireland is the last remnant of the ill-gotten gains of an invader, kept when the rest was returned to rightful sovereignty. To the Protestant majority however, Ulster is no less than Home.
There is a danger in the age of instant communication and media pervasiveness that when the positions of rancorous groups are enunciated, every gesture draws a line in the sand, every tic becomes a blink or a not-blink. No one can be seen to be weak or even overly conciliatory and everything represents something else.
There are voices on both sides of the Northern Ireland situation who say the issue isn't any more "who did what to whom, when." It is only "what can we do now to make everyone's situation better." We have seen striking evidence in the past decade that people who hate and mistrust each other can try to make arrangements for their mutual benefit, even over the obstructionism of frenzied nationalists.
In the short term, such pragmatism may reduce the violence. In the longer term, it may reduce hatred. But this mess started in 1171.
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