CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000

 

Northern Ireland’s Burden of History
by John E. Osborn

 

A year ago last November I found myself in West Belfast on the infamous Falls Road, the main thoroughfare bisecting the heart of a working–class Catholic neighborhood synonymous with sectarian violence. Even today, Protestant taxicab drivers will refuse an evening fare to an address on the Falls Road. With some trepidation, I had accepted an invitation to speak with a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) spokesman about the deteriorating state of the Northern Ireland peace process, but I began to question my judgment as I ducked into a pub just after nightfall. My dress and manner marked me as an outsider, and it was apparent that this was not a place that welcomed outsiders. As my eyes scanned the periphery in search of my contact, two rather large, tattooed men suddenly confronted me. Though I am not a member of the Protestant community, for a moment I felt just a bit of the anxiety that many residents encounter on a daily basis. Fortunately, I was immediately introduced as a friend: “John, meet my mates. They’ve just got out of Maze Prison under the prisoner release program.”

Trust is a precious commodity. It binds disparate elements in a community and facilitates the successful negotiation and implementation of agreements. Its absence is palpable in Northern Ireland. The two communities of Northern Ireland (one Protestant and one Catholic, albeit with various shades of gray within them) share the same territory, and much of the same history, but their prevailing cultural and political perspectives are distinctly different. Beyond this essential reality, three decades of violence tend to put people on edge. Vague anxieties on both sides have been sharpened and exacerbated by the increased presence of released paramilitaries. Although the 1997 IRA ceasefire generally has held firm, Protestants have demanded that the IRA demonstrate its commitment to peace by laying down at least some of its vast weapons stockpile under the so–called “decommissioning” process, an act that many republicans view as tantamount to surrender in a war they have all but won. At the same time, quintessential British institutions like the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) are seen by unionists as vital to their safety, and by nationalists as an illegitimate occupying army that must be disbanded.

The power of these divisive sentiments was sufficient to delay for one–and–a–half years the implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, even in the face of significant political pressure brought to bear by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. The decision by the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in late November 1999 to participate with Sinn Fein party members in the new Northern Ireland executive body finally allowed for the long contemplated devolution of power from London to Belfast. However, this should not be construed to mean that peace is at hand. If the IRA has not begun to disarm before the February meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council, UUP leader and Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble has pledged to resign and bring down the delicately balanced ten–member executive body.

More broadly, there remain significant obstacles to restoring civil society, curbing violence, reconciling political interests, and satisfying emotional grievances. Tempting though it may be to focus narrowly on questions of arms and political prisoners, the primary barrier to lasting peace lies in the historical and cultural legacies of a divided people. As one government official told me: “Decommissioning is not the disease. Decommissioning is the symptom of the disease. The disease is the lack of good will.” History Creates Identity.

History can be read impartially, honored, or manipulated. Certainly it may be regarded from legitimately different perspectives so that the same series of events are used to support rival nationalist claims. This has surely been as true in Ireland as it has in the Balkans.

There are two periods of Irish history that cemented the separate identities underlying the conflict in Northern Ireland. The first occurred primarily in the seventeenth century, as the English established “plantations” in the north of Ireland. This was not designed initially to result in broad dispossession, but rather had several more benign goals: urbanizing the eastern portion of Ulster, segregating Scottish and English from Irish, imposing English property law so as to secure land holdings, and ensuring a more reliable measure of political support in Westminster. Gradually, a less ambitious policy of Anglicization appears to have metamorphosed into colonization, which involved a broad redefinition of titles and land ownership. As insurrections by the existing landed gentry arose and were systematically repressed, the English used the opportunity to broaden the scope of confiscation in Ulster.

Plantation settlements led to overt conquest by the middle of the seventeenth century, and it came to Ireland in the person of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s army ran roughshod over token Irish resistance, burned villages, slaughtered peasants, and sacked castles. The devastation wrought by Cromwell in 1649–50 was so complete that in most areas, Irish land ownership of more than 60 percent was reduced to almost nil. Any residual Catholic hopes for meaningful emancipation from the English were dashed when Stuart King James II was defeated by William of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne (1690). This seminal event, which is still celebrated annually by the Orange Order parade marches, assured more than two centuries of Protestant British rule over Ireland.

The second critical period began in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Charles Stewart Parnell led the Irish movement for land reform, and with others fomented for home rule. These developments were distinct but related, and further separated Ulster from the rest of Ireland. As historian R.F. Foster has noted, the land reform movement “reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and–implicitly–Protestantism.”1 Irish politics thereafter took on an increasingly radical cast, beginning with Arthur Griffith’s formation of Sinn Fein in opposition to British participation in the Boer War. It reached the zenith of futility in the death, arrest, and martyrdom of hundreds in the Easter Rising of 1916; progressed through Michael Collins’s genius in applying modern guerrilla tactics to assassinate local constabularies and British agents; and culminated with the Anglo–Irish War of 1919–21 and the infamous peace truce that established the Irish Free State in December 1921. Finally, a brutal and divisive civil war pitted the new Free State forces led by Collins against an anti–treaty guerilla army backed by future Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera.

The history of these few years is dense and fascinating. How important was this time for Ireland? In truth, the Irish would have had home rule eventually under a law passed by Parliament in 1914, and it can fairly be argued that the “bloody catalog of assassination and war” accomplished only a little more. As Collins said during the dramatic treaty debate in the Dail Eireann, it offered merely “the freedom to achieve freedom.”

But the implications for the solidification of separatist beliefs among Protestants in Ulster were extraordinarily important. Ulster Protestants became proxy holders for the paranoia and resentment directed by Catholics against their British masters. As a legal matter, the fate of Ulster was decided under the Government of Ireland Act (1920), when Britain formally declared six of the original nine counties to constitute a separate political unit. Northern Ireland Protestants regarded Home Rule as “Rome Rule,” and in 1921 voted along religious lines to remain part of the United Kingdom. Although nationalists in the south viewed partition as unfortunate, many accepted it as merely the formalization of a political settlement that was the price to be paid for independence from Britain.

Necessary or not, Northern Ireland’s populace was split two to one between Protestants and Catholics, with Protestants congregating in the east, Catholics in the rural west, and urban ghettos of both groups in Belfast and Derry. Catholics faced widespread discrimination, while Protestants believed they were under siege from the south. Underlying the conflict were opposing ideologies concerning the status and nature of the state. Little has changed in the past seventy–five years.

Sectarian Divisions. Notwithstanding the inexorable march toward modernity and secularity in Britain and the other industrialized states of western Europe, religion continues to play a critical role in many ethnic conflicts. Indeed, the prevailing wisdom is that religion is the all–consuming source of enmity that divides the people of Ulster. During my time in Dublin, a business executive with extensive dealings in the North assured me that while there were political, historical and economic roots to the troubles, “the conflict most certainly is about religion. If we were sitting in Belfast right now, we would both spend the first ten minutes of our meeting trying to determine our respective religions.”

Whether or not it is fair to generalize about the increasing secularity of the western world, it is apparent that any such generalization does not apply to Northern Ireland. Although religious influence in the North appears to be diminishing in relative terms, both Roman Catholics and Protestants in Ulster continue to report rates of churchgoing that are two and three times higher than those of the same religious faith in other European countries, and they score high ranks on other measures of formal religiosity. These statistics tend to reinforce the perception of outsiders and local atheists that the conflict can be attributed to dogmatic religious beliefs. In substantiating the basis for this perception, secular humanists would cite the occasional propensity for combatants to use religion as a device to rationalize violent acts which would otherwise be socially and morally unacceptable; “sacred violence” makes politics absolute.

Admittedly, religion often defines group identities. Religion also reinforces the social boundaries between Protestants and Catholics established principally through segregation in housing and education, and through rigidly endogamous marriage patterns. As such, religion may be viewed as a kind of class marker that tends to indicate a person’s likely perspective on a number of issues. Even so, it is not always dispositive. Other dynamics are at least as important to understanding the origins of the dispute, including broader cultural differences, a history of antagonism, and socioeconomic discrimination. In a survey conducted by the Policy Studies Institute in 1986, Ulster residents of both principal religious groups were asked their views as to the cause of the troubles, and among the responses offered by Protestants, religion came in fifth behind political or constitutional concerns, discrimination, violence, and general attitude. When Protestants were asked in a 1978 survey what they would fear most about unification with the Republic of Ireland, they listed fear of the Roman Catholic Church as a significant concern, but this was outweighed by fear of the loss of their British identity and the loss of the standard of living.

There are other implications that would flow from granting religion primacy as the source of conflict in Northern Ireland. If the Ulster brand of evangelical Presbyterianism itself is the cause, then it would seem (as others have argued) that the conflict would not be susceptible to resolution by other than religious–based solutions, such as secularization, ecumenism, or integrated schools. Polling data has indicated an unprecedented correlation between political partisanship and religion in Northern Ireland, supporting a widespread perception that is reinforced by the reality of visible participation by Protestant clerics. There is a logical fallacy at work here, though, which concludes that because only Catholic nationalists support the IRA, and only Protestants support Ulster unionists, it is the religious variable itself that is determinative. If religion is the principal source of the Ulster conflict, then a fundamental paradigm shift ought to occur early in the next century as two apparent trends continue to their logical end. Catholics will soon outnumber Protestants in the north and the Catholic Church will soon have negligible influence over political issues in the south. This expectation is the source of much of the political strength of Sinn Fein, and its concomitant willingness to share power–for the moment–is an arrangement that may well be a prelude to a national Irish state.

Politics of Peace. Politics is the culprit most often blamed for stagnation in the peace process, and in Northern Ireland, politics is a blood sport. The locals have coined many a colorful phrase to describe the process and its participants: tribal politics; cul–de–sac politics; à la carte politics; apocalyptic politics; in–your–face politics; riverdance politics. Symbols have always been important in politics, but in Northern Ireland politicians brandish their symbols like weapons. For example, upon entering the Parliament Building at Stormont, one confronts large, rather grim statues of Protestant, British governors. When meeting Reverend Ian Paisley’s lieutenants, or UK Unionist party leader Robert McCartney, one must first regard their proud and prominent display of Union Jack cufflinks and red poppy lapel pins so as to dispel any question of their political alignment. Such things may seem trivial and inoffensive to outsiders, but the people of Northern Ireland have been rubbed raw; the excruciating level of sensitivity is such that every gesture is a manifestly powerful tool that goes beyond self–identification to define and incite the other side.

When the Apprentice Boys Club of Derry sought to commemorate the anniversary of the occasion in 1688 on which the city gates were shut to ward off James’s advancing army, Catholics staged a riot. The commemorative march clearly was an expression of pride and a reflection upon an important historic event for the entire City of Derry, but after years of hostility and discrimination any march by a predominantly Protestant group is construed as overtly antagonistic by many in the Catholic community. This dynamic of suspicion and mistrust denies the other side the legitimate right to celebrate its heritage. In such an atmosphere, even attempts to politically neutralize established institutions are virtually impossible without giving offense. More recently, former Hong Kong Governor Christopher Patten’s report on the RUC was criticized vehemently for recommending elimination of the organization’s British vestiges, including a standard which places a crown over a harp and shamrock. Symbols aside, no one disputing the report has suggested alternative, substantive reform measures that would transform the RUC into a police force remotely reflecting the demography of the constituent population.

Culture of Violence. There also remains violence. It is diminished from years past; there are no British tanks in the center of Belfast. But the imposing “Peace Wall” still stands, separating the Catholic and Protestant working class communities in the Shankill and the Falls Road areas behind brick, concrete block, barbed wire, and hostile graffiti slogans. No one denies that violence still permeates great swaths of Northern Irish society, and extends far beyond what Americans commonly perceive to be limited to sectarian Protestant on Catholic retributive attacks, and vice versa.

”Punishment beatings” have filled the void created by the complete absence of local policing activity in many parts of the North, and are only the most visible example of a thirty–year disintegration of the rule of law and the moral values that underlie it. These “beatings” are meted out to punish informants and sexual deviants alike and can range in severity from being hit repeatedly with a nailspiked baseball bat, to “kneecappings,” to a “50/50,” in which the offender is shot once at the base of the spinal column,leaving him with a 50 percent chance of retaining the use of his legs. Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries employ these tactics not only for purposes of intimidation or retribution, but also to further increasingly sophisticated drug trafficking operations, gun running, and other criminal activities.2

An Irish Nation? The continued proliferation of these destructive behavioral patterns are at once deeply discouraging and completely predictable. Yet the framework of the Good Friday Agreement remains as the foundation from which political progress will be made. Ironically, one of the great strengths of the Agreement lies in its explicit recognition that Ireland is a case of nation and state, specifically one Irish nation encompassing two states. In contemplating the region in 1993, University of Chicago law professor Gidon Gottlieb prophetically suggested that the parties might aim to create a new all–Irish homeland that would exist as an overlay to the existing Republic of Ireland and province of Northern Ireland.3 This Irish national home, Gottlieb predicted, would “restore the symbolic unity of Ireland . . . without prejudice to the existing status of Eire and Northern Ireland.”4

This symbolic unity is vital because, like history itself, it affects perceptions, and perceptions in turn affect behavior. So again, reflect upon Irish history. A tenant farmer will point to a hillside on the horizon and say, “my family used to own that land; they took it from us.” Only later in the conversation does it become apparent that he is speaking of events that occurred in the seventeenth century. The Catholic world order was altered irrevocably by the English invasion and the subsequent deprivation of liberty; being further deprived of their sense of Irishness simply is unbearable. Protestant resentment toward Catholics is triggered as much by feelings of abandonment by their English cousins as it is by terrorist bombings. Their sense of security can only be preserved if they know that they will remain part of the United Kingdom.

The beauty of Gottlieb’s formulation is that one side need not lose to allow the other to win. Catholics (and Protestants, for that matter) residing in Northern Ireland could elect to become citizens of the Republic, but unification would never be forced upon those who wished to remain citizens of the United Kingdom. Rather, the objective would be to foster national identity among all those who equate a unified Eire with the true sense of being Irish, and to ensure effective cooperation on matters such as tourism, transportation infrastructure, and commerce that affect the entire island. Though Gottlieb’s prescription for joint citizenship may not be workable, his concepts underlie the objectives of the new North–South Ministerial Council, and various other collaborative inter–governmental arrangements involving the North, the Republic, and the United Kingdom that have been established under the Agreement. With time allowed for incremental progress, these arrangements perhaps can narrow the divide amongst politicians and their constituents.

Rebuilding Trust. David Trimble and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams have taken enormous risks to bring their respective constituencies to this stage. Mr. Trimble has been more audacious of late in his willingness to join the Northern Ireland executive body prior to any IRA decommissioning. Although the Agreement does not explicitly require disarmament prior to implementation, the parties agreed that all paramilitaries must disarm and that they would “use any influence they may have to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms” by May 2000.5 As such, the time has come for the “hard men” of the IRA to demonstrate that they have no intention of resorting to violence again, and that they are willing to freely give up their weapons and live under the norms of civil society. The legendary resourcefulness of the IRA means that such an act is necessarily symbolic. But the impact of purely symbolic gestures in Northern Ireland at this time cannot be overstated. You can almost envision British Prime Minister Blair pacing back and forth in utter frustration at No. 10 Downing Street, crying out in Shakespearian verse: “A simple gesture, a good faith gesture, my kingdom for a gesture!” This gesture apparently must come soon, lest the elaborate exercise in trust building collapse before our eyes.

Regardless, the Good Friday Agreement cannot alone end the violence, foster civil discourse, or bring harmony to a fractured polity. Other elements within the Catholic and Protestant communities must work in concert with implementation to sustain the nascent legal framework. There have been tens of thousands killed and maimed during the last three decades. Virtually everyone involved in the peace negotiations has been affected directly by the violence. It will take decades to heal the deep wounds inflicted on the populace, but there are exceptional people making exceptional efforts in an attempt to do just that. The Irish Council of Churches, and many individual priests and ministers of various congregations, have brought an ecumenical approach to faith–based reconciliation. The Greater Shankill Partnership and Restorative Justice Project of West Belfast is working to limit punishment beatings and other forms of vigilante justice.

Political leadership is vital as well, and not simply as the kind of leadership that takes risks in negotiations. Blair’s order to reexamine the 1972 killing in Derry of fourteen unarmed Catholics by British troops on “Bloody Sunday” was a vital step toward broad reconciliation. Irish President Mary McAleese, her own family a victim of sectarian violence, displays a kind of charismatic, vibrant, emotive leadership that can soften the hearts of the most hardened souls as she speaks eloquently and often of the collective need to forgive and heal. Echoing Professor Gottlieb, she told me that “the lesson of the Good Friday Agreement is that there need not be one winner and one loser. We need gradually to convince people in the North that everyone can win.”6

The cumulative effect of rising levels of European integration and economic development will make it increasingly difficult and especially painful to reverse course. In the past decade, Ireland has attracted a wealth of multinational technology firms to Dublin and Cork, though in many rural areas its economy still lags well behind that of the United Kingdom. In the North, economic privileges borne of decades of subsidization stem from affiliation with Britain; many Protestants (and some Catholics) are naturally apprehensive about the prospect of relinquishing these privileges. But if there is a single factor that is most responsible for the violence in Ulster, it is the centuries of animus, segregation, and mistrust. And if there is a single factor that hardens the position of Ulster Protestants in their desire to stay in Britain, it is their fear of what life may come to be should they be incorporated into the Republic of Ireland. This history, and this fear (misguided or not), must be addressed to the satisfaction of both communities if lasting peace is to come to Ulster.

A permanent peace in Northern Ireland cannot be imposed from the outside without the active participation and support of the parties themselves. Prime Ministers Blair and Bertie Ahern of Ireland have been instrumental in the process; without their immense political skill, influence, and tireless efforts there would be no “process” at all. Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell has been heroic as he literally pulled the parties back from the brink time and again. Ultimately, well–intentioned external actors must step aside and the people themselves must embrace reconciliation, participate in the new political process, and develop a shared sense of community. The Good Friday Agreement can be made to work, but only if all parties are committed deeply to principles of self–governance, and to ending systemic violence.

The sole cause for optimism, therefore, lies within the polity of Northern Ireland. There are many Protestants who are proud to call themselves Irish, who deplore violence, and who recognize the futility and irrelevance of attributing significance to a border separating six counties in the northeast corner of a windswept island, especially now that it is integrated into the European Union. There are many Catholics who do not consider the cause of unification to warrant spilling another drop of Irish blood. It is the collective force of these many thousands of good people in Northern Ireland, who have acted responsibly and charitably in the face of extraordinarily difficult circumstances, that can compel Messrs. Trimble and Adams to continue to take the political risks necessary to complete the task at hand. Only then will Northern Ireland be permitted to rejoin the civilized world.