Listen to former prisoners

During a prolonged period of civil strife the capacity for those caught up in violence properly to empathise with the suffering…

During a prolonged period of civil strife the capacity for those caught up in violence properly to empathise with the suffering of their fellow human beings gradually diminishes, writes David Adams.

For most people this isn't deliberate but a survival mechanism that automatically kicks in as the conflict becomes bloodier and the body count rises.

It would be impossible for anyone fully to absorb the horror of each and every act of savagery and assign to it the revulsion and sympathy it warranted, without seriously threatening their own sanity.

The difficulty with that, however, becomes all too clear when society eventually begins to move beyond conflict, and proper modes of conduct and expression need to be re-established. Then there becomes apparent the extent to which everyone, to some degree, has become accustomed to, and accepting of, brutality as an everyday part of life.

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An example of this in Northern Ireland is our high tolerance for summary justice and violence in general, as a means of expression. It's a tolerance level that belittles us all. A common reaction to almost daily reports of club-wielding gangs beating young men to within an inch of their lives is "They didn't get it for nothing."

When some unfortunate is murdered, the police need only mention any combination of "drugs-related", "internal feud" or "criminal history" for us subconsciously to dismiss the victim as somehow deserving his fate.

We have forgotten that, in any civilised society, the right to a fair and proper trial is automatic; as is the right to an assumption of innocence until proven otherwise, irrespective of what someone is accused of. Those are fundamental principles that protect the weak from the strong and all of us from mob rule.

Any tolerance of punishment attacks also ignores an obvious truth: whatever victims' alleged anti-social activities, behaviour doesn't get much more anti-social than clubbing people to a bloody pulp or shooting them down like dogs in the street.

We are also far too accepting of, and too ready to make excuses for, whole communities which automatically resort to violent confrontation the moment something displeases them. Decision-making based on acquiescing to those who can pose the greatest threat to civil order, so common in Northern Ireland, is hardly the mark of a healthy society.

By necessity, I suppose, no one became more detached from any sense of empathy with victims than the combatants themselves. For them, other human beings had to be considered as "legitimate targets"; soldiers and police officers, "uniforms"; and the accidental killing of ordinary men, women and children, "collateral damage". Whatever the words, it amounted to the same: "Regrettable, but these things happen in war."

And yet it is from this very quarter that some of the best efforts are being made to drag Northern Ireland back to normality.

In west Belfast a small number of loyalist and republican ex-prisoners, without fanfare or fuss, regularly liaise to lessen tensions at community interfaces and take the heat out of potentially explosive contentious parades.

One west Belfast loyalist has played an important role in developing community infrastructure in deprived loyalist areas of Portadown and, critically, has helped ease problems associated with the annual Drumcree parade.

The underlying message from these particular ex-combatants is that dialogue is the way to resolve or manage difference. While paramilitary punishment attacks certainly continue, there are ex-combatants, on both sides, who have made clear their total opposition to them.

None more so than republican ex-prisoner, Anthony McIntyre. Nowadays a prolific writer and commentator (and editor of an on-line magazine The Blanket), McIntyre has often railed against such attacks, describing them as "brutal torture inflicted upon the communities".

Another hopeful sign was the recent visit to Northern Ireland by a former ANC activist, Robert MacBride. Now a police chief in South Africa, he spoke to republicans in south Armagh and west Belfast where, according to reports, he stressed the necessity for proper law and order and opposed summary justice.

Particularly striking were comments by Anthony McIntyre and a fellow republican ex-prisoner, Tommy Gorman, during a recent BBC documentary on the killing of Lord Mountbatten. McIntyre accepted that the world would view Mountbatten's death in the context of "not someone oppressing the Irish people, but the murder of an octogenarian and innocent children on their holidays".

Gorman, referring to the enormous hurt we have inflicted on each other, asked simply: "What was it all for?" His pained expression indicated the question didn't need an answer.

For many people it may seem strange, or even objectionable, that some ex-combatants are to the forefront in trying to lead Northern Ireland back to normality. But when one considers that conflict, and its associated obscenities, have been the only normality ever known by anyone in Northern Ireland under 40, then it becomes clear that we need all the help we can get.