MacGill Summer School: The former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald yesterday described unionists and nationalists in the North as "slow learners" in a keynote address to the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.
Dr FitzGerald was giving the fourth annual John Hume Lecture on the theme: "Why did Irish history take so long, and where is it going?"
He said people in the South were slow to adjust to the radically new political situation that arose in the North in and after the late 1960s.
"For 50 years, we had hugged our Southern grievance about the loss of 'our' fourth green field, while showing remarkably little practical concern for the faith of those of our fellow nationalists who dwelt in that abandoned field.
"Only the descent of the North into near-anarchy in the early 1970s forced us in the South, after several years of utter confusion, most belatedly to face reality.
"In the North there were slow learners also. The unionist politicians and people sought to secure themselves against change by discriminatory and repressive policies that would eventually undermine completely their own moral position as a local, artificially contrived, majority.
"And, if I may say so, the nationalist minority were also slow learners.
"Badly led for almost 50 years, they failed to assert their rights, choosing all too often the sterile path of abstention from parliamentary politics.
"Finally, late in the day under new and vibrant leadership, they finally abandoned their futile hopes of practical aid from what had long since become a self-absorbed and uninterested South, one that for decades past had become content to salve its conscience by occasional outbursts of puerile propaganda at home and abroad against the evils of partition.
"Instead, these new nationalist leaders started to wield with growing success the weapon of peaceful protest to which, over many decades of liberalism and social democracy, British public opinion had become intensely vulnerable."
Dr FitzGerald said that there were, however, in every community those who knew how to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory.
"Northern nationalists in the early 1970s included enough people of this kind, still gripped by memories and myths of a violent past, who were prepared to throw away the gains being made by their new constitutional leaders by futile armed action designed to secure by force what was already in the process of being achieved through a combination of skilful nationalist politics and futile unionist reaction."
He added that unionists had, undoubtedly, been slow learners from Sunningdale.
"But what can one say of later day Sinn Féin and their IRA?
"It took a quarter of a century and 3,500 unnecessary, brutal deaths for them to learn what was already self-evident in 1970 - that in the modern world of democratic states and codes of human rights, peaceful protest and political action are far more potent weapons than the Armalite or Semtex.
"When in the aftermath of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, i.e. the years between 1986 and 1993, the penny eventually dropped with them, the political path ahead had to be cleared for these slow learners by those democratic politicians whom Sinn Féin had for long derided - John Hume, and successive governments of the 'Free State'.
"In fairness, one must add that once the IRA leaders had belatedly adopted the previously despised path of peace, they demonstrated political skills that matched, and indeed at times seem to surpass, those of their long established democratic rivals. But the slow history syndrome is still today hard at work within Sinn Féin/IRA itself. Ten years on from 1993, feet are still being dragged."
Dr FitzGerald said that as in its first period of 35 years, the economic history of the Irish State during its second generation, from the late 1950s to 1993, appeared, at least superficially, to have justified the concept of the slowness of Irish history. "For, although futile, inward-looking policies were reversed between 1956 and 1959, the Celtic Tiger nevertheless postponed his or her appearance for almost 40 years until 1994. Why the delay?
"The fact is that in the 1960s and 1970s the Irish economy grew at a rate of over 4 per cent a year, which meant that after Ireland joined the European Community in 1973 its output was rising faster than that of its partners.
"But because this recovery was accompanied by a sharp drop in, and in the 1970s an actual reversal of emigration, and because the consequent rapidly growing number of young people remaining in Ireland were at that period still disposed to marry young and start families for several decades, the growing output of the Irish economy was being largely absorbed by a rapidly rising population.
And for several decades most of this additional population remained dependent - women at home, children, students, and unemployed rather than workers - so that economic growth did not for that period contribute to catching up on the living standards of our neighbours".
Dr FitzGerald said that in the 1980s, the self-inflicted wound of a prolonged financial crisis, sparked off by gross mismanagement of our economy at the end of the previous decade, halted our progress. But thereafter the economic history of the Irish State speeded up with a vengeance.