OUR HISTORY WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER’S HISTORY
Posted By: September 01, 2014
Tom Kelly. Irish News ( Belfast). Monday, September 1, 2014. IN 1960 an opera singer called Leonard Warren died during a performance of Verdi's La Forza del Destino (the power of fate), he had just completed an aria which began "morir, tremenda cosa" which translated means " to die, a momentus thing." It struck me that there must be something satisfying about passing away at an appropriate moment and with an appreciative audience. Albert Reynolds may not have died while still performing but there was no doubt that he was more than a strolling troubadour in our recent troubled history. There is even less doubt that his timing was supreme. His most significant achievement was by far the Downing Street Declaration and without it there would have been no IRA ceasefire and no Good Friday Agreement. To do what he had to do in British/Irish relations he believed required simplistic notions and vague understandings; or perhaps even misunderstandings to be agreed in principle. To his credit he lived in a world where everything was transactional. Handshakes, nods and winks were his craft and that's how he sealed deals. Although he was a relatively short-lived holder of the job he most coveted, as Taoiseach he was the right man at the right time, when an even braver politician and under-rated prime minister also held tenure by his finger tips in Downing Street. There can have been no warmer tribute for one politician for another than that made by John Major about Albert Reynolds. The death of Reynolds nearly coincided with the 20th anniversary of the much written about IRA statement on cessation of hostilities and the faux loyalist one that will soon follow. There's no doubt that these anniversaries softened many criticisms of Reynolds. Here was another great peacemaker off to make his final peace. Reynolds has more than secured his footnote in the tomes of literature yet to be written about peace process players that has more pawns than a chess board. Writing about the Northern Ireland peace process is like trying to hold ground on quick sand. One wrong word will portray one as anti-peace process or season ticket holder. But our history will never be another's history. Firstly, the old IRA failed the beleaguered Catholic community in Northern Ireland when they were besieged. The new IRA could hardly hold its own before the inevitable split. The IRA leaders never led on the civil rights movement but radical students, teachers, communists, the left, social democrats, moderate nationalists and liberal unionists did. Mainstream political unionists did run Northern Ireland like a public school junta by Protestant elites for Protestant elites. Working class Protestants were treated like cannon fodder by their representatives but bound together by a diet of suspicion, fear, religious intolerance and the promise of jobs. The British government was shamed into action on the north and the Irish government was dragged into it. Policing in Northern Ireland had become so partisan that Iain Smith's policing of the then Rhodesia seemed more impartial. The British army were brought into police Northern Ireland with all the skills of Attila the Hun and Colonel Blimp combined. And then the cycle of Armageddon started: Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, Ballymurphy, Kingsmills, Miami Showband, La Mon, the Shankill Butchers, McGurk's bar, Guildford Four, the Maguires, Warrenpoint, hunger strikers, Loughgall, Gibraltar, Enniskillen, Loughinisland, Greysteel and the list goes on. It got to a stage were there were no lines between where paramilitarism ended and state sponsored terrorism began. It was not so much a dirty war as a cesspit and throughout it all, each of the main belligerents and protagonists from all sides were speaking on and off to each other since 1973. Paramilitaries had guidelines to protect each others turfs. Seemingly, securocrat authorities let prostitution, protection rackets, drugs, cigarette and fuel laundering to take place to protect murdering and profiteering touts. It became so complicated it was impossible to know who was running who. Mostly the public paid a price too dear to ask of anyone for all of this criminality, collaboration and cover-up. But in whose name? Were you asked? Of course peace eventually came, as all wars, especially wars of attrition become too hard and too expensive to maintain. And yes things are better than before - people are not dying and at least now we like to think we who are the goodies and baddies but please, please don't expect me to celebrate the cessation of things not done in my name. "Morir tremenda cosa" yes, but of natural causes or an accident and no applause.
