IN a British prison, there is an unborn child whose destiny would appear to have been set irrevocably by history and politics. The grandchild of Bernadette McAliskey will soon be born in the most dramatic and symbolic circumstances imaginable, an innocent pawn in a legal scenario being played out between the British and German authorities.
The child's mother, Roisin McAliskey, is herself a child of the Troubles. One wonders how much control she has had over her own destiny, and whether she herself was as much a pawn as her baby is now. But maybe it is presumptuous to believe that Roisin's life could have ever been any different, or that she would want it to be.
Do any of us actually have the control over our destinies that we like to think we have? Maybe we are, after all, mere victims of our biographies.
"We all come into the world with a script already written for us, although we do have the opportunity to elaborate the dialogue," says Marie Murray, head of the psychology department at St Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin.
"Throughout history, there are examples where successive generations have worked hard to bring about political or environmental changes in society. The social constructionists would say that our reality is shaped by the ideas in our surrounding culture and there is no doubt that if you are born into a culture of conflict, you are going to take on the ideas of that culture," says Murray.
"The dominant idea in Roisin McAliskey's culture perceives social injustice and the desire to do something about it. But this influence would exist within any value system. What it points to is the power of the parental value system - which has got very undermined in recent times - to communicate certain values, whether it's carelessness or altruism, prejudice or ambition," she adds.
Entire families of high achievers are common in Irish public life. Think of the political families - like Charles and Sean Haughey, Ian Paisley and Ian Jr or Eamon de Valera and his grandchildren, Sile de Valera and Eamon O Cuiv. Maire Geoghegan Quinn has written about the emotion that surrounded the belief system in which she was tutored, which stressed the importance of becoming involved in social change.
In the arts, think of Mary and Frances Black or the Cusack sisters. In business, there's Tony O'Reilly and his sons. In the media, there's Bob and Dan Collins, both broad casting administrators. Everyone knows entire families of doctors and solicitors for whom the term, "a chip off the old block" would seem to have been invented.
But the parental influence can be negative, too, trapping generations in cycles of violence, or simply mediocrity. Are there crucial stages in life - windows of opportunity, perhaps - when with insight we can plot our escape from the patterns set for us by our parents?
Murray sees the opportunities for choice in crucial events, rather than stages. Without making any judgments on the McAliskey case, and while emphasising that she herself is totally opposed to violence, Murray comments that when still a child, Roisin McAliskey witnessed an attack on her family which was very traumatic and which may have indicated to her that what was happening was evil and wrong and needed to be addressed that the people who did this had to be challenged.
In a small parochial community such as Northern Ireland, all parents are playing a role in forming the attitudes in their children which will ultimately determine history. "You need to step back and ask, how many generations holding firm views - some of which are valid and some which are not - are we going to encounter? We have witnessed great degrees of wrong on both sides, and if we start counting who is more wrong we can't arrive at a solution. When we feel threatened, then we become more concrete, more rigid and more tunnelled in our views, then we see less effective means of escaping the patterns of the past," says Murray.
THE tendency to have a rigid, tunnel view of the world doesn't always express itself in politics. Why do some children rebel against parental attitudes, while others appear to become virtual clones of their parents, choosing the same kinds of careers and even wearing similar clothes?
According to Rob Weatherill, a psychoanalyst, there are critical moments in life - in late adolescence as we leave school and choose careers, in the late 20s as we choose our life partners and in middle age when we have the opportunity to at least attempt to shape our destiny rather than be shaped by it, but he adds that we can only liberate ourselves from our parents' patterns to a degree.
"In a therapy situation, you can see whether people have followed a particular fate staked out for them in advance or whether they broke free of what was a very strong imposition from their family of origin," he says. "An awful lot of depression in later life would be related to the realisation that one has not been totally different to one's parent," says Weatherill. "You can sustain the hope in the 30s, but coming into the 40s if you feel you have not achieved what you set out to especially if your expectations have been high - this can lead to a collapsed".
Breaking away from family patterns to stake one's own claim is not impossible, but it is difficult, so much so that Freud used the almost fatalistic term - "the repetition compulsion" - for our unconscious tendency to complete our parents' unfinished business, often in an extraordinarily detailed fashion. Family secrets have a way of insinuating themselves into children's lives, even when children are not consciously aware of them. Parents hand down guilt or pathology - such as violence, alcoholism and manic depression - just as they hand down beloved traditions.
Psychologists use the term "psychotic enclave" to describe how madness can pass from one generation to the next through families without ever being worked out. Often, this is because the behaviour involves violent control which is so devastating for each generation of children that it is almost impossible for them to work it out, even though they are aware of it.
For Roisin McAliskey, Weatherill points out, the pressure to repeat various patterns would have been even stronger than for ordinary people because of the "huge cultural and symbolic forces invested in that repetition". Roisin is a product not just of her parents, but of her political milieu. "Her past is so dramatic that her future is equally predictable," says Weatherill.
Ironically, her situation is similar to that of Britain's Prince William who has inherited responsibilities as his father did before him. Even if Roisin or William were to dare perform an emotional and political Houdini act, the personal cost could be too great. There is a high risk of suicide among individuals who cut themselves off from not just their families, but also their cultures of origin, says Weatherill.
"If they break free, they risk complete loss of any identity or involvement in a culture," he says. Unless Roisin McAliskey was prepared to forego any kind of affection or to escape and be an outcast, then she perhaps had no choice about much of the way she saw the world.
The power of community - especially in places like the Republic and Northern Ireland where community is still strong - can be overwhelming even for ordinary people. To be the child of a judge, garda, solicitor, teacher or bank manager can be as much a psychological burden as it is a privilege because the expectations of not just the family, but the community are so high. Such children tend to achieve or rebel. As it was said over Freud's cot, "he'll either be a criminal or a great man".
In the post modern era, however, more Irish people than ever face the challenge of breaking away from such patterns - and without emigrating. "I'm 50 years old and the difference between my generation and my parents has been third level education," says Weatherill. "Education has been a huge liberator; my generation knew a lot more and therefore had more choices."
THE intellectual journey can only take you so far, however. Colman Duggan, a psychologist who works with children, has observed that even in very young children you can see the anarchic instinct to break from the parent which we all have, alongside deep and sometimes irrational loyalty. He has seen children who have been put into care for their own safety, beg to be returned to the parts who hurt them.
Whether we rail against or deify our parents, the bottom line seems to be that it's a major mistake to think parentage is of little relevance to the people we turn out to be. The truth is that Roisin McAliskey remains as free an agent as any of us will probably ever be.
"Some would see her as very successful," Duggan remarks, pointing out that she is now famous, "albeit in a miserable situation".
In Duggan's view, Roisin McAliskey appears to have formed her own identity apart from her mother's, just as each of the Cusack sisters has taken a "chip off the old block" and made her own particular contribution artistically. And this may be the best that any of us can ever expect to do.
By the time we come close to liberating ourselves from the script handed down by our parents, comments Rob Weatherill, "often we are already near death ourselves or are already facing our own children, who are looking into our eyes and wondering if they can ever liberate themselves from being like us".