`We need to stop making demands," said Father Gerry Reynolds on Questions & Answers. "You can't tell the other side who they are or who they must be." In a week dominated by attempts to decommission the decommissioning issue, what a magnificent irony that, of all people, a Redemptorist priest should sermonise about the dangers of sermonising. Though they could easily be dismissed as typical pious platitudes, the priest's remarks, were, in fact, the wisest on the subject all week.
It's not hard to understand why a majority of people believe the IRA ought to decommission some arms or explosives. Even to those who don't see it primarily as a moral issue, it makes pragmatic good sense for republicans: it saves the Executive and, very likely, some lives too. But as Father Reynolds' comments intimate, the key to unlocking the riddle is to try and understand the core feelings, not just ideas, which decommissioning inevitably raises among republicans and their opponents.
Whether you consider IRA people to be thugs, dupes or heroes is not, for the Dissue, greatly relevant. What's crucial is to recognise, not endorse or ridicule, people's senses of self-definition in all this. "You can't," as the priest said, "tell the other side who they are or who they must be." (Strictly speaking, of course you can, but you're wasting your time.) The conflict has now been pared down to the primordial issue of parity of self-esteem. We have reached immutable cores. The soul of the Troubles is about sovereignty of identity.
Though it may seem trifling and exasperating to many observers, a republican cannot accept, for instance, that after "drawing" with the forces of a monarchy, he should have to behave in a way not demanded of his enemy. Unilaterally decommissioning his weapons, even if he sees pragmatic sense in it, cannot but make him feel lesser than his rival. But not feeling lesser than his rival is the essence, indeed the whole point, of his republicanism. To him, he is being asked not only to repudiate his ideology but to betray his sense of himself as a person.
To the majority of observers, who just want to get on with their lives, the IRA attitude appears obstinate, selfish and daftly self-aggrandising. More trenchant critics will feel that because they have used, or at least supported the use of violence, IRA people have forfeited the right to anything so human as a sense of themselves as persons. But that view dehumanises them and they respond with the ultimate dehumanisation - killing people. Then they in turn may be killed and so the cycle goes . . .
Irish history drips with examples of conflict over immutable cores. The split over a forced oath of allegiance to the British crown, which caused the "brother against brother" civil war in the then Free State, was based on the irreducible fact that you can't be a republican loyal to a monarch. You might decide it's in the common good to go through the motions and treat it as an empty formula, but you can never square a circle. The Garvaghy Road march is about similar "having the last word" symbolism. Likewise the 1981 republican hunger strikes: political prisoners or common criminals? Feelings cannot run deeper.
The IRA attitude would appear to be that it will take powerlessness and opprobrium sooner than humiliation and self-invalidation, for that is how it feels to them. Most people in contemporary Ireland have been fortunate enough to have personal histories and temperaments which have caused the ancient ethnic passions to abate and lie so deeply dormant within them that they appear primitive, absurd, even embarrassing. But there are, we know, random elements, such as place and time, as well as personal responsibility, involved in emotional development. The traditional acknowledgement of this begins "But for the grace . . . "
It's also true, as was pointed out and agreed on Q&A, that there is a valid fear of the IRA among many ordinary Protestants. For them it is not necessarily a matter of IRA humiliation and surrender, though it can be too. (Think of the DUP!) But core self-identity on the unionist side is essentially such that any equality for republicans undermines the state's allegiance to monarchy, the unionists' primary symbol of immutability. And, of course, immutability is the essence, indeed the whole point of monarchy.
ARGUING that in the year 2000, the British crown has no real power and is merely symbolic is to miss the point. That may be as you see it, not how it feels to militant republicans. (And anyway, Queen Elizabeth's signature is required to suspend the Assembly by "royal assent". How do you think that feels to people who don't assent to the notion of royalty, who really believe it's an ancient, anti-democratic con trick?) At the immutable cores of identity, symbols - flags, colours, myths - are Power. In fact, little else matters.
With decommissioning and all it symbolises, we're at deeper levels than normal morality. We're down at the level of instinct and lecturing people about their instincts is notoriously counterproductive. It's a delusion, too, to believe that modernity or civility or even good sense can ever offer total protection against roused instinct. Remember that even highbrow Germany succumbed to base instincts. Sometimes nature just swamps culture with transformative effects: Yeats saw a terrible beauty; others saw a terrible waste.
Yet the dominant attitude in the media towards the IRA's refusal to decommission has predictably been one of anger. Tellingly, on Q&A, John Bowman, a formidably intelligent man, was angrier than any of his panellists, who also included the Northerners Dermot Nesbitt, Monica McWilliams and Mitchel McLaughlin. He couldn't see (though it appeared that they, being immersed in the North, could sense) that at the core level, rational argument is pretty well redundant.
Other more atavistic, but equally human, forces are in the driving seat. Even though the very admission that such forces dwell within us all is enough to freak many people, we dismiss, mock or get sanctimonious about them at our peril. The manipulation of such forces caused Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda and the rest. Mostly ordinary people did the butchering.
There is also, of course, for the IRA, the difficult matter of democracy. The majority of Irish people want the IRA to decommission, so refusing to do so is anti-democratic. It can't but be (even though the IRA will argue that, given partition, there is not full democracy in Ireland). But the symbolic enemy of the IRA, the British crown, by defining itself as being above the people's ballot box, is the antithesis of democracy. The monarchy, even if it felt it could win 100 per cent of the people's vote, would cease to be a monarchy by ceding sovereignty to the people. As squares can't be circles, monarchists can't be democrats, subjects can't be citizens.
Again, to most people who just want peace, talk of the power of symbols is easily dismissed and seen as childish, petty and primitive. Blaming people, whether republican or unionist, for feeling as they do, only worsens the situation. Likewise the pathetic and ignorant attitude in the Republic and in Britain which claims not to understand "those people" and wishes that the North could be detached from the wonderful rest of us and floated off into the Atlantic.
It's also especially unfortunate that the usual adversarial, drama-enhancing techniques of journalism only make matters worse at the core. Though fine in the realm (or republic) of reason, trying to apply logic to subjects which also inhabit the republic (or realm) of instinct can be lethal. To the exasperated outsider like, say, John Bowman, it's simply a matter of common sense but the senses of reason and instinct are not built on common ground. In fact, they are themselves adversarial, their friction producing human energy which can be positive and negative.
So the unionists want product and the republicans want time. To each the other wants to have its cake and eat it. One's obstinacy is the other's integrity. It's not merely a political problem, in so far as restructuring society will solve it. It's a deeper human problem and you cannot, by definition, restructure what's immutable. That's the essence, the whole point in being unchanging.
WHO knows now if the process can be saved? (It may be over by the time this appears.) But even though the psychodynamics are explosive, Ahern, Blair and Clinton may be able to find a solution acceptable to both the IRA and the unionists. Some symbolic act of demilitarising by the British army might possibly convince the IRA to move on decommissioning. Then again, the unionists might veto that as the IRA has vetoed the Trimble deadline.
Ultimately, of course, as Kim Philby, who knew a thing or two about both sides in the Cold War, declared: "You have to come down on one side or the other." We all do. Even so, comic ironies abound: Catholicism, in its hierarchical structure, is much more like monarchy; Protestantism, in its plainness, more like republicanism. (Perhaps all this is just as well, considering that when Protestant republicans met Catholic monarchists we got, for instance, the double whammy of Cromwell at Drogheda.)
One thing however is clear: television, and indeed the media in general, is ill-suited to defuse this problem. It's more likely to detonate it. It has been thus throughout the peace process, of course, with journalists - albeit understandably - eager to construct the usual media narratives of good guys and bad guys oversimplifying a psychologically knotted situation. We've all done it, of course, though some more conspicuously and more dangerously than others. A further irony, and perhaps a lesson in humility for us in the media: the biggest Irish story of the past 30 years ultimately cannot be resolved by the techniques of conventional journalism.
If you were to put such a psychodrama on stage, you could play it as either comedy or tragedy. I don't know if that's funny or tragic. But we'll all find out soon enough. The core psychology of the North's conflict has never been so starkly visible as now. The most hopeful sign on Questions & Answers was the fact that the panellists, though they had their set positions and beliefs, were hardly antagonistic towards each other at all. If opponents can empathise with each others' difficulties, there's always hope that concern for the common good will prevail over the claims of competing sovereignties (if that word can have a plural!).
Given the week that's been in it, leading the TV column on the obvious claimant, Nation Building, seemed especially inappropriate if the peace process was about to go down the toilet. Talk about a title that suggests jumping the gun (sorry!). However, the opening episode of this eight-part series on Irish architecture, though rather rococo as television documentaries go, was very impressive. Not that the series is without irony either: it's sponsored by the ESB, whose head offices infamously blight the Georgian line of Dublin's Fitzwilliam Street.
Anyway, as there are seven more programmes to go, there's time to return to Nation Building, which is already shaping up to be the Taj Mahal of RTE output so far this year. A series which ended this week but which also deserves revisiting is Channel 4's Private Parts. Essentially it was a feast of genitalia (though given the subject, "feast" may not be the collective noun to everybody's taste), and sometimes hysterically funny. A female sex therapist described another woman's private parts as having a real simple "art deco" look. The same term was used about Busaras in the architecture programme. TV is still great for some stuff.