Sir, - The questioning of Prof Mary McAleese's involvement with Sinn Fein has reopened "a very raw wound" in the Northern nationalist psyche of Sean McConnell (The Irish Times, October 18th). He cites Ms. McAleese - a beneficiary, along with thousands of other Catholics, of the British Education Act, a law graduate and a pro-Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University - as "someone discriminated against by the system". But it seems the ultimate insult is the attitude of hostile Southerners who suggest that Northern nationalists are "not Irish".
I had always thought that there was almost universal support in the South for the civil rights struggles insofar as they sought fair treatment for Northern Catholics. The unsympathetic response Mr McConnell complains about may be related, not to these issues, but to a deep-seated unease with the direction in which Northern nationalists, of both the violent and non-violent varieties, would like to lead the South. A body of opinion has emerged in the South which is able to distinguish between a campaign to redress Catholic grievances in Northern Ireland, with which it is in complete sympathy, and the use of such grievances to justify a war aimed at forcing a million-strong community out of its British national allegiance and into a united Ireland.
Few Southern nationalists want their aspiration to a united Ireland to put them on a direct collision course with the unionist community. If there was an excuse in the 1970s and 1980s for complacency about where territorial irredentism leads, there can be none in the late 1990s, in the aftermath of Bosnia. Yet there is a sense in which Northern nationalism is felt to be pushing, not just unionism, but also Southern nationalism, in a direction it does not want to go.
All of this is highly relevant to Prof McAleese's campaign for the Presidency. The only evidence so far of "bridge-building" on her part is that between violent and constitutional nationalism. Mr McConnell says in her defence that "a real democrat would urge everyone to vote Sinn Fein to strengthen the hand of Gerry Adams against the hawks in his movement". But the jury is surely still out on whether this is the only, or the most probable, effect of a strenghtened Sinn Fein. Many Southerners are not at all reassured by the fact that the republican campaign of violence has been put on hold, for the time being, only through a cosying-up of nonviolent nationalism to Sinn FeinIRA and the creation of a pannationalist front with Sinn Fein as its cutting edge.
Bridge-building of this kind brings together in one movement those who accept the principle of consent as normally understood, with those who reject it and retain the weaponry to enforce that rejection. This can hardly be conducive to building bridges where they matter, across the community divide. If the Presidency is about symbolism, a President McAleese would symbolise confrontation rather than conciliation. - Yours etc.,
From Dermot Meleady
Dublin 3.