OPINION:What are the prospects of reconciliation in the North when forebears of Protestant children are being demonised, asks David Adams.
IN 2005, President Mary McAleese likened Northern Protestants to the Nazis in how they had taught their children to hate Catholics. Later that same year, Father Alex Reid went further still: "They [ Northern Catholics] were not treated like human beings. It was like the Nazis' treatment of the Jews."
In each instance, a hasty apology ensured that the remarks, though not forgotten by Protestants, were set to one side. A fortnight ago, they came to mind again, when former police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan aired her thoughts on Protestant attitudes. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, she told how, having grown up in England, she was astonished to learn "fairly recently" that Protestant children in Northern Ireland had been taught to distrust Catholics.
Regardless of whether she hails originally from England or Timbuktu, it is inconceivable that Mrs O'Loan has only just realised that one of the poisonous by-products of a vicious politico/religious conflict such as ours is that children can become embittered.
As a responsible parent who raised children in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, she must always have been alive to the dangers posed to young minds. But then, she wasn't talking in general terms about the damage that can be done to children in a conflict situation. The point she was making was that Protestant children (when challenged on local radio, she subsequently changed this to "some" Protestant children) had been actively encouraged to distrust Catholics (though she neglected to say by whom).
Everything was pitched in the past tense, and underpinned by the claim that this was something she had only learned recently.
Contrary to some readings of her remarks, it's clear that she wasn't referring to the period of the Troubles at all. Rather, like the President and Fr Reid before her, she was outlining how things were, according to a certain worldview, before the Troubles began.
Though she stopped far short of levelling anything like the same grossly offensive, hyperbolic accusations of Nazi-like attitudes and practices, it is hard not to conclude that she, too, was attempting to lay blame for the Troubles on the Protestant community.
It has long been openly acknowledged by rational religious and political leaders on the Protestant side (most famously by David Trimble in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech) that many of the old pre-Troubles, unionist-dominated local councils did indeed discriminate against Catholics, particularly in public sector employment and in the allocation of housing. There was also widespread discrimination in the private sector, though by no means practised exclusively by Protestant employers.
Further, it is beyond dispute that the Civil Rights Association had wholly legitimate reasons to protest, and that the protests themselves were handled abysmally by successive unionist governments of the day, but it is as disingenuous now as it was then to imply that multiple votes for business owners in local elections disenfranchised only Catholics. Working class people right across the board in Northern Ireland were affected. Somewhat ironically, as a business owner, the President's father would have been entitled to multiple votes, whereas my own father, an ordinary householder, had only one. Nor was multiple voting in local elections particular to Northern Ireland: it was only finally abolished in the rest of the UK in 1950.
This is not to try to defend or deny anything that happened before the Troubles began, but merely to point out that, whatever the mythology, Northern Ireland was never remotely like Nazi Germany - or, for that matter, like South Africa or the southern states of the US either. Sectarianism is not something that only emerged with the founding of Northern Ireland; it has plagued the island of Ireland since the plantations, and never been confined to just one community.
At what point do these lopsided "analyses" of the origins of the Troubles begin to excuse what was inflicted upon unionists during the conflict? Gross exaggeration of past injustices and the heaping of all the blame on the unionist community bring us close to Sinn Féin's claim that the IRA's campaign was an extension of the struggle for civil rights, and only about achieving "equality". Countless statements from P O'Neill making clear that the struggle was for a 32-county, socialist republic will, no doubt, be glossed over also.
What of the children of today, and our hopes for the future? Leaving aside her comments in 2005, the President and her husband Martin work tirelessly, far beneath the political architecture, where it really matters, on trying to reconcile the two religious tribes. But what are the prospects for genuine reconciliation when Protestant children must listen while their forebears are forever demonised, while, at the same time, Catholic children are fed a history that casts their antecedents as perpetual, blameless victims of "the other side"?
How much resentment, bitterness and tribal grievance is that storing up for the future? How do we imagine it might eventually manifest itself? For all our sakes, it is high time Northern nationalism threw up a leader (political or otherwise) like David Trimble, who has the courage to speak hard historical truths to his or her own tribe.