Here are two images of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. The first is of Reginald Maudling, the British Home Secretary with responsibility for the North, visiting Belfast soon after his appointment. As he climbs on to the plane carrying him back to London, he says: "For God's sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!"
The second, some time later, is of a Republican rally in Derry's Bogside. Daithi O'Connell, reputed to hold a senior position in the IRA, introduces the next speaker. A tall, blond youth takes the microphone and says: "It doesn't matter a f**k what Gerry Fitt or John Hume say. We'll just fight on until we get a united Ireland." Wild cheering from the young crowd. It is Martin McGuinness and this, as far as I know, is his first public speech.
The 1970s were a period of simple - deadly - certainties in both parts of the island. A time of passionate convictions, it was also the most bloody decade of "The Troubles". Two thousand people, more than half of the total who were to die in the following 30 years, perished between l970 and l979. The decade began with internment and ended with Margaret Thatcher in power in No. 10 Downing Street. Or, viewed from a Dublin perspective, it started with the Arms Trial and ended with Charles Haughey's election as Taoiseach. But, more important than any of these things, it was a time when both communities in the North had to learn, in blood and tears, the reality of the other's right to exist. By the end of the 1970s we were still a long way from peace, or even compromise, but at least it seemed that both sides had come to accept that the bloodshed of those terrible years - 496 deaths in l972, 252 in l973, 303 in l974, 308 in l976 - could not be allowed to continue.
Just two years previously, it had seemed that the problems of Northern Ireland might be solved without resort to the atavistic cruelties of the past. The late 1960s had brought the Civil Rights Movement, drawing its inspiration largely from similar campaigns in other countries. Nationalism was no longer an issue. A young priest in Derry said: "Sure, we've all been reared on the BBC's Home Service and Welfare State milk". There were mass demonstrations at which young and old linked arms to sing "We Shall Overcome". The arrival of the British army on the streets was seen as a victory for justice. I remember one soldier, throwing a barbed-wire barrier across the bottom of William Street. He spoke with a strong Dublin accent and the crowd joked with him: "You wouldn't fire on us. We're all Irish." He smiled, but replied: "It's the Queen of England pays my shilling, and it's the Queen of England that I serve."
By the early 1970s that already seemed an age of innocence ago. The new order of justice and an end to discrimination, which Jim Callaghan had promised from the top window of a house in the Brandywell, had not materialised. The unionists still ruled at Stormont and, inevitably, when the British army was used to quell riots and break up marches, it came to be seen as another instrument of the majority's power.
After the introduction of internment in l970, there was no going back. The IRA - which had been sneered at in l969 for its failure to defend vulnerable Catholics burnt out of areas of Belfast - was back on the streets. Bloody Sunday in 1972 ensured that it would not suffer any shortage of recruits for the next generation. Even John Hume, the most determinedly moderate of nationalist leaders, conceded that for many people in the Bogside the only answer was a united Ireland.
Looking back now, more than 20 years later, what is most striking is how many people in both Britain and Ireland also seemed to view this outcome as both correct and inevitable. The Provisionals, formed early in l970, certainly regarded it as their main objective. But British ministers, while publicly describing the idea as unattainable, were prepared to consider and discuss it in private. William Whitelaw met a delegation from the IRA in Chelsea in l972, including Gerry Adams who was released from jail for the purpose. He dismissed their demand for a declaration by the British government of its intention to disengage from Northern Ireland, but conceded that Adams and Sean MacStiofain were determined to fight on for this purpose.
Much has been made in recent days, following Jack Lynch's death, of the then Taoiseach's steady rejection of any intervention in the North. Maybe that was so, but it sometimes didn't feel quite like it at the time. Many Northern nationalists believed that Lynch would take action to protect them against any serious threat of Loyalist violence. The attitude of many politicians south of the Border was equivocal. The mood in the Republic, particularly after episodes such as Bloody Sunday, was highly volatile. Haughey did gain power with the help of the green flag wrapped firmly around him. It took a long time for public opinion to shift from the still dearly held belief that if only the British would leave the North, Ulster Protestants would rediscover themselves as true Irishmen. Remember Wolfe Tone and Henry Joy!
British ministers often added to the mood of uncertainty. Officially, of course, British policy followed the line laid down in the Sunningdale Agreement, the creation of a powersharing executive in the North accompanied by a Council of Ireland. This is what both Dublin and London wanted. It hardly matters now what wrecked it - Faulkner's inability to hold his party together, unionist opposition to any form of powersharing, the Council of Ireland, Dublin's refusal to move on Articles 2 and 3 - except that the parallels with our present situation cannot and must not be ignored.
Both governments miscalculated the determination of the unionist community to resist it, a unity of purpose which meant that civil servants and respectable members of the middle classes supported the Ulster Workers' Strike led by paramilitaries and extremist politicians.
"We are the People. We cannot be moved" was the message and it took the British political class a long time to recover from the shock. No loyalist protest that followed was as successful, but the threat of a unionist show of strength remained extremely potent until 1985, when Thatcher faced down opposition to the Anglo-Irish agreement. It took politicians in this State even longer to come to terms with the reality of one million Protestants. Right up to 1983, when the New Ireland Forum was set up, the preferred solution to the island's divisions was the creation of a unitary state.
BRITISH ministers, exasperated by their own impotence, spoke of the mainland taxpayer being bled dry and of growing impatience with Northern Ireland's politicians. Plus ca change! Merlyn Rees admitted that withdrawal was discussed as part of a doomsday scenario around the cabinet table, as was repartition. Such rumours served to fuel unionist paranoia, which was then given practical demonstration in loyalist attacks on innocent Catholics. At the same time, the speculation encouraged the IRA to believe that a united Ireland was within reach. An IRA truce in 1975, accompanied by the existence of incident-centres jointly monitored by the Provos and the NIO, did nothing to reassure either the unionists or the SDLP. The latter was being squeezed and this inevitably led to a "greening" of the party from its early years.
It's often been said, during the course of the present peace process, that the Belfast Agreement is "Sunningdale for Slow Learners". The jibe is aimed at the Republican movement and is intended to say that what is on offer now is virtually identical to the deal that was available in 1974. This shows no understanding of how different the two situations are, how far both communities have had to travel in the meantime. Implementing the Sunningdale Agreement was not possible in l974. The unionist community was not prepared to accept it. Neither were the Republicans who, as long as they were kept outside any discussions, had the power to wreck them.
There were other parties to the conflict. This State did not begin to appreciate the depth of unionist fears, the power of a slogan which said "Dublin is only a Sunningdale away". The British kept telling the Irish to forget about history, as though that were possible in a situation when hundreds were dying violently on all sides.
Added to this, and it was an enormously important obstacle to the task of reaching a compromise, was the extraordinary ignorance which each community had of the other's experience, culture, identity. Brian Faulkner told me once that he had simply never known that there were politicians of the calibre and intelligence of John Hume in the Catholic community.
This ignorance extended to social life and culture. A middle-class Protestant woman told me in the early 1970s that if she had to choose between being operated on by a Catholic surgeon or not being operated on, she would chose the latter. She couldn't be "absolutely sure" that the Catholic doctor would sterilise his instruments. On the other side, a kindly Catholic priest, whom I had asked about the incidence of mixed marriages in his parish, replied that he was glad to be able to say that of l5 couples who had come to him in this situation, not one had gone ahead with their wedding.
There were attempts to build bridges, most notably by the Peace Women in the mid-1970s. But the trouble with all such efforts was that they took place against a background of continuing death and suffering. It was almost impossible to talk, or even think, of reconciliation against a background of atrocities such as Bloody Friday when the Provos set off 26 bombs in a single day in Belfast. To list the deaths, or even to try and imagine the grief, would take too long in this space. But no journalist who covered those days will ever forget the desolation of the funerals - the small police band piping an RUC man to his grave, the weeping of young widows, the bewildered faces of small children as they begged to be told what was happening.
Other factors added to the bitterness of those days - the mistreatment of suspects, the terrible miscarriages of justice which did such damage to the reputation of the whole British legal system. Perhaps one of the worst omissions, again looking back, was the lack of care and support for victims who were all too often left alone to come to terms with their pain.
Mercifully, my space is running out. No, that's not quite accurate, for it is a salutary experience for us to look back at how things were in the 1970s and how far we have come. I'm often accused of being over-optimistic about the present peace process and too inclined to ask for patience for the politicians in the North. Their task is a dreadful and a noble one - to lay to rest this terrible weight of history. Looking back at the 1970s we cannot but give thanks that they have come so far and wish them Godspeed on the road ahead, however long and difficult it may be.
Mary Holland is an Irish Times columnist
