I never fail to be astounded by the power of Northern Irish tribalism. It should be beyond belief that anyone could regard the UDA butchery at Sean Graham bookmaker's shop on the Ormeau Road five years ago as anything but an act of wickedness, vile beyond either belief, mythologising or muralising. It was the softest of targets full of blameless Catholics, five of whom were murdered in an attack that combined homicidal brutality with an almost perverse and gratuitous cowardice. It would be reassuring to think that such a massacre was isolated, but it was not: it was a textbook loyalist operation whose sole purpose was to subdue and terrorise Belfast nationalists.
At the time it was seen as a truly diabolical work, past all human understanding. Yet now we learn that in Dundonald they are raising an Ulster Freedom Fighters' mural to one of the fine young gentleman who assisted in this attack and who is now serving 20 years in jail. So what are to make of this?
That nothing changes in Belfast. The light might fall differently on walls, and illusions might dance before our eyes; mirages of peace and plenty rise before us, and we become intoxicated with possibilities. But they are meaningless. We should have learned that from the last ceasefire, when we were assured that things were changing for ever; the IRA war was over for good, John Hume told us, time and time again. It's over, he said. It's over.
Tribalism beguiles
It's not. It's never over. And you don't have to study the Dundonald mural to realise that: you just have to read "An Irishman's Diary" by a guest columnist last Tuesday to see how tribalism is one of the most beguiling of all human characteristics.
Michael Commane is, I'm sure, a decent man, and he assures us that he is opposed to violence, which as a Dominican priest he should be - though of course, as he would probably be the first to admit, the Dominicans were once such ferocious Inquisitors that they were called Domini Canes, the Hounds of the Lord (Pope). And it was a Dominican, Tetzel, whose indulgence-selling aroused such a deadly wrath in Martin Luther. In other words, being a Dominican is unlikely to over-impress Ulster Protestants.
Michael Commane tells us that he recently spent three months in Belfast and it was the experience of a lifetime. One of the lessons he learned concerns the wearing of the poppy. "Whatever I might have thought before, after just three months in Belfast, I was happy to see our President-elect minus the poppy. I could never wear a poppy. What would I be saying to those who have been discriminated against, to those who have always felt marginalised?"
Obsessive victimhood
I haven't a clue; and it doesn't matter. Nor do the issues surrounding the wearing of the poppy, the dead of two World Wars and all that caper. No, what that blameless vegetable has come to represent in this Dominican's eyes is, as far as I can see, unionist discrimination against nationalists, and the almost obsessive concern with victimhood which goes into the making of much of the identity of West Belfast.
That there is absolutely no logical relationship between the floral commemoration of the dead of two World Wars and the conditions in which the people in West Belfast live is irrelevant. The poppy for many people is now simply a symbol of unionist hegemony, and symbols have power beyond the meaning of those who devised them and those who wear them; their greatest power of all is in the perception of others, and if people's identity thrives on insult, on grievance, on oppression, the more likely it is that offence will be found, insult taken, moral superiority assured and identity confirmed.
The little poppy now has that power: and so has the equally blameless shamrock in those parts of West Belfast Michael Commane didn't report visiting: the loyalist bits, the red-white-and-blue covered slums, with their pubs - the Mountainview Tavern, the Four Step Inn, the Bayardo and many others - which were attacked by the IRA and their occupants slaughtered. Had he gone into any of the bars on the Shankill wearing shamrock at any time, even during a ceasefire, I would fear for his life.
News Letter jibe
Insult is taken not just from emblems. Michael Commane wrote that for the launch of the new Enterprise service, the unionist News Letter sneered about the dirt on the train from "Eire" and about the name Iarnrod Eireann. The News Letter, of course, in the world of Michael Commane, is not entitled to its form of tribalism, even when it speaks the truth: the name of the State, declared in the constitution and approved by referendum, is Eire. Our trains often are dirty. And to outsiders, Iarnrod Eireann might appear a rather laboured neologism.
Yet that aside, a cultural slight was probably intended. That is the way with competing tribes. Well might Michael Commane wonder: if he feels as he does after three months, what would he be like if he had spent his lifetime there?
Indeed. So how can there be a final settlement if a simple rail service can't be opened without tribal sneering and tribal hurt, and if a peace-loving Dominican priest swears after 12 weeks in West Belfast that he could never wear a poppy?
There cannot. There is no final settlement. There is only a hunt for unicorns.