EDITORIAL N. Ireland accord offers chance to begin again
Any good news out of Northern Ireland is worth
putting to music after nearly 30 years of troubles and more than
3,000 dead. And anyone who steps forward and takes a risk in a place so parched
for peace is worthy of high praise. The human race is so askew -- call it the
problem of evil or original sin -- that only occasionally is the right temper
found, the right circumstances, the leaders in the wings, for significant
remedies to such old dilemmas.
All hail, then, to the courageous people who made history in
Belfast April 10, including David Trimble and Gerry Adams and John Hume and Mo
Mowlam and Tony Blair and Bertie Aherne and George Mitchell and Bill Clinton
(involved in the peace settlement).
But behind these prominent names there are thousands of others,
Protestant and Catholic, Irish and otherwise, who transcended dreadful
circumstances to keep a spark of hope alive or to nudge tolerance into action
or to publicly or even privately forgive some of the dreadful crimes committed.
Life was very raw and intense for a generation, and while it dragged some down,
it brought out the best in many. All hail to them, too.
The Belfast peace agreement -- with something for nearly everyone,
including a promise to loyalists/Protestants that British rule will not be
yanked from them by force, and a promise of a cross-border body for
nationalists/Catholics to keep their all-Ireland hopes alive -- has been
repeatedly described as the end of the troubles. But its hard
to pinpoint the end of a quarrel that goes back to the civil rights marches in
the 1960s; goes back to the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and the border the
loyalists wrapped around themselves in the six most Protestant counties; and
back before that to the Plantation of Ulster in 1611, when the native Irish
Catholics were driven from their lands to make room for loyalists; and even
before that to 1169, when an Irish petty king invited over a British warlord to
help settle a local score, never suspecting the guests would stay century after
century.
Its not easy to bring all that to a close.
I dont think there will be peace, said a young
Catholic visiting Milltown Cemetery where most of the dead republicans were
buried wrapped in flags. There is still too much to be settled. If
ones uncle or sister was killed by the other side, not by accident but
out of ancient bitterness, such a death seems in vain unless there is
payback.
When the TV crews and the big names go home, who will dare pull
down the peace line, Irelands own Berlin Wall between the
bitterest neighborhoods of Belfast that was being refurbished even as the talks
were concluding?
Every eligible citizen gets a chance to vote on what will happen
next. Among the enemies of this peace looms the Rev. Ian Paisley, head of his
own homemade church, who in 30-odd years rose from local buffoon to
international politician while spewing public hate and division as the conflict
spread. Paisley will not go gently into any peaceful future.
Other, less raucous but more insidious factors pose an equal
threat. Most reports mentioned that the new peace accord will end the IRA
campaign of violence -- as if that were the heart of the matter. Such accounts
neglect to mention the decades of sophisticated but brutal discrimination
carried out by the majority against the minority. The first peaceful (almost)
civil rights march, in 1968, was triggered by the eviction of a Catholic family
of 10 from a council house in the village of Caledon so that a 19-year-old
Protestant girl could have it. This was not a bureaucratic screw-up but
business as usual under 50 years of Unionist rule. And housing was but one
element in a refined system of social suppression.
Can Northern Ireland, long mired in injustice as well as violence,
weary for so many good and bad reasons, now rise to the challenge of a new
tomorrow? Some countries have transcended histories as awful as Irelands,
from Germanys amazing unification to South Africas even braver
confrontation of old evils.
As the big players go home, the more tedious task now begins:
rebuilding peace from the ground up. If anything worthwhile is to happen, the
churches must be prominent, first as signs, also as guarantors and movers and
makers. And the outside world must be prominent, especially the United States,
providing material help but especially moral support to a province where both
sides believe America is the last stop before heaven.
It will still take courage, patience and ingenuity to bring to
conclusion what the peace accord so tantalizingly promises. This is less an
ending of anything than a precarious beginning, perhaps of something lasting
and great.
National Catholic Reporter, April 24,
1998
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