Unity

From Unity, 21 February 2009

Still a long way to go

by W. Owl

The “peace” settlement in Northern Ireland has been and is being touted around the world as a living example of how to solve civil conflict.
     The new US administration appointed George Mitchell as its Middle East envoy because of his role in Northern Ireland; but are some people slightly overestimating the situation here?
     No-one wants to downplay things, but equally no-one should upplay things either.
     Certainly the violence is no longer an issue, even though the thorny issue of loyalists’ weaponry is still with us, and “dissident” republicans are around and seemingly still committed to the “armed struggle.”
     Unfortunately, whilst the political violence may have been cleared from the streets sectarian violence is still around.
     One particularly nasty case come to a head a couple of weeks ago when a young Protestant man was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for a sectarian attack in 2006 which left a Catholic man in a coma which he may never come out of.
     The young man, aged sixteen at the time, was part of a gang, but he is the only person to be charged and sentenced.
     The attack, for which the young man has apparently expressed no remorse, led the Democratic Unionist MLA William Hay to comment that the “cancer” of sectarian attacks “must be rooted out of society.” Having said that, he then predicted that it may take “another generation or two” for such violence to cease. He went on to make the point that whilst sectarian attacks are on the decrease, such assaults were becoming more severe, with victims being left for dead.
     In the same issue of the Irish News that reported Hay’s comments, Monday 9 February, the editorial dealt with the same issue. It made the point that the young man involved in the attack was fours years of age when the paramilitary ceasefires were announced.
     Four years later, when the Good Friday Agreement, was signed he was still at primary school, showing that “he could have had little or no personal memories of the violence perpetrated by all sides.”
     Yet at the age of fifteen he was “centrally involved in a completely unprovoked and blatantly sectarian outrage.”
     The editorial makes the point that “it is deeply disturbing that a state that is arguably more peaceful and politically stable than at any other time since its creation should still produce a teenager as consumed with extreme sectarianism as this young man.”
     Susan McKay, writing in the following day’s Irish News under the heading “Kids poisoned by hatred still being raised in the North,” dealt with the same topic when she described the young man and his friends who carried out the attack as “something very scary. Young, violent, sectarian and with no capacity for pity or remorse.”
     McKay refers to the fact that, whilst no guns were used in the attack, “by allowing loyalist paramilitaries to hold on to their weapons for all these years the British government has effectively condoned their continued power and influence over another generation of young boys.”
     She also refers to the time she spent in the loyalist Fountain estate in Derry researching for her book on Northern Protestants, which was published in 2000. Some of the twelve and fourteen-year-olds she talked to “suggested that their hostility to Catholics was not about their own experiences but passed on to to them from their parents.”
     Sectarianism is not the property of one side, and I do not want to go into the history of its origins, just to relate an experience during a May Day celebration in St George’s Market when some youngsters from the nationalists Markets area were going round asking kids their own age, who they obviously did not know, to pronounce the letter “h.” This is one of the ways, apparently, to tell someone’s background. It stems, so I am told, from the way you are taught to pronounce the letter, depending on whether you went to a Protestant or a Catholic school.
     Northern Ireland has made big strides over the past ten years, but there is still a long way to go. But let’s hope it’s a bit less than “a generation or two.”

Home page > Publications > Unity > Still a long way to go

Baile > Foilseacháin > Unity > Still a long way to go