On this day, 25 years ago, silence and sorrow eclipsed the sun as a gun carriage carrying Princess Diana’s coffin was wheeled through London. Today, her quarter-century anniversary scarcely dents the public consciousness. Must every hero become a bore in the end? Or has the malice of time and too many biographies changed our view? Was this most heartbreaking victim, in retrospect, a bit of a monster?
The idea of victim turned monster is not new: the Greeks gave us, among others, woman archetypes in Medea and Clytemnestra. It was central to Freud’s theories. But it can happen to whole societies too, defining their identity.
The Belfast Telegraph’s LucidTalk poll finding last month provides chilling insight: seven out of every 10 nationalists agree with Sinn Féin deputy leader Michelle O’Neill’s assertion that “there was no alternative to violent resistance during the Troubles”. Put bluntly, this means that nearly three-quarters of nationalists believe there was no alternative to the killing of 3,720 people, the majority of whom were civilians, almost half under the age of 25; no alternative to almost 50,000 injured.
It’s no surprise young people support O’Neill’s assertion – we know that from all polls. What is shocking is that six out of 10 over-45s do too.
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They have no excuse of ignorance of history. They may have been very young when IRA bombs killed families at the La Mon restaurant, passengers on a train in Belfast, Lord Mountbatten, his grandchild Nicholas and local boy Paul Maxwell at Mullaghmore. But they were getting older as the IRA murdered British politicians at annual conferences, bandsmen playing in Regents Park, shoppers in Harrods.
And they were well able to understand what happened at Remembrance Day in Enniskillen where 11 people were killed and 63 injured by an IRA bomb. They were all young adults when the IRA murdered Garda Jerry McCabe in Limerick and shot and dumped 34-year-old single mother Caroline Moreland’s body on a lonely road in Fermanagh. Her crime – revealing an arms dump even as the IRA was negotiating its first ceasefire.
The lists go on and on – more than 16,000 bombings – their names recited like the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.
But the LucidTalk findings question whether those atrocities are now seen as sorrowful at all – by adults who rejoiced when the Belfast Agreement ended the Troubles; who signed up to the “consent principle” (no constitutional change without unionist consent) in almost exact proportion to the “no alternative” numbers now.
How did this reversal happen? For the answer look first to the story.
Six years of the decade of centenaries coincided with Brexit-born Anglophobia to feed a new cycle of victimhood
Princess Diana’s story was that she was a victim of a very powerful family. Yes, she suffered and, yes, she turned her pain into empathy with others. But she was also apparently an arch media manipulator. According to Tina Brown, her most credible chronicler, she controlled the Martin Bashir Panorama interview, secreted the crew into Kensington Palace, made herself up to look haunted and rehearsed her lines. Her purpose was sabotage: to destroy Prince Charles. He was “unfit” to be king. The message landed thanks to media collusion.
A story is the version of events a person or a community buys into, or is persuaded to accept. Take the young wife of a customs and excise officer, born into Border county farming stock, her Catholic nationalist identity as natural to her as the mountainy air, who found herself pregnant among mainly Protestant neighbours in remotest Donegal.
Alone a lot (an occupational hazard for an excise wife), she was heavily reliant on those neighbours. They saw her through childbirth, kept her safe and warm through the coldest winter on record. And though the peripatetic life soon took her little family elsewhere, she never forgot them: their names engraved on her heart. Her children grew up to her mantras. “They pot their herrings, store their apples and preserve their plums – Donegal Protestants can live on the clippings of tin. But they’d give you the shirt off their backs.”
Then came the Troubles with its endlessly perpetuated story of Protestant discrimination against Catholics. To the bewilderment of her children, victimhood turned her affection for Protestants sour. It took a few years and the murderous IRA campaign against Protestant farmers on the Fermanagh border to bring her back to her senses and her truth. That woman was my mother and this story is a parable. Like the “no alternative to violence” findings, it is testimony to the destructive power of a magnified sense of victimhood.
Six years of the decade of centenaries coincided with Brexit-born Anglophobia to feed a new cycle of victimhood. Like Diana, it would not have happened without media collusion. Victimhood at the hands of the British and unionists is the fare that nourishes the Sinn Féin narrative of “no alternative”. But there can be another story.
The television series I May Destroy You by celebrated Ghanaian film-maker Michaela Coel is ostensibly about sexual consent and the moral morass victims face when seeking justice. The powerful finale is pertinent to all coercive situations. Murderous revenge is never a solution – it leaves a new and terrible stain on the victim. It was done and it left a terrible stain on all our psyches. Why recycle that?