Dr Martin Mansergh“It is not always appreciated how much the Churches have restrained violence” writes Martin Mansergh
“To gain a friend, you must first reconcile with an enemy”. This admonishment is delivered by the Irish princess to her captor and lover in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde based on a French medieval romance. Variations on this sentiment have been expressed by many people. The enmity may be long gone at the time of reconciliation, but it will have existed in the past, without necessarily having been either universal or constant. The Montagues and the Capulets were engaged in gang warfare in an Italian city state, but it did not prevent their respective offspring Romeo and Juliet being secretly married ‘by holy church’.
In the Irish context, reconciliation conjures up two ideas, omitting a third one, which requires, but does not always receive, equal emphasis. The first relates to Protestants and Catholics, unionists and nationalists, not of course the same thing, especially outside Northern Ireland.
The second idea relates to Britain and Ireland. The third aspect, often neglected, is the reconciliation of past deep divisions within the national community. Some republican-minded people seem to find the idea of reconciliation with unionists easier than having to tolerate Redmondites or revisionists!
Victims
We also need to remember the many non-aligned innocent victims who paid the price of conflict and to reflect on those who found themselves on ‘the wrong side of history’ with no way back. John Reynolds of the Garda College in Templemore has written a poignant account in his 46 Men Dead: The Royal Irish Constabulary in County Tipperary 1919-22.
Most of the ‘old RIC’ came from similar backgrounds to the Garda Síochána in its early decades, but their function in those revolutionary years, to uphold in effect British crown colony government against the Irish Republic, put them in a false position, forcing many who survived to leave post-Treaty.
Inter-Church relations have improved enormously since the 1950s. The coldness has gone, differences have narrowed, and there is a realisation that the Churches need each other.
The turning-point was Pope St John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). While full Church unity is not in prospect, clergy work together, as appropriate, share civic duties, and lead. Pluralism today encompasses far more than the accommodation of minorities and immigrant communities.
It is also the response of the Church to a society no longer largely homogenous from a religious viewpoint, and where there are loud but not always representative demands for secular change. Where the position of the majority is now often hard to discern, pluralism provides some protection to those not wishing to rush into precipitating change without adequate reflection on where it might lead.
It is not always appreciated how much the Churches have restrained violence. The point was made convincingly at the conference on faith-based education organised by the Irish Catholic that Catholic schools in the North did not swell the ranks of the paramilitaries.
It is true that militant Protestantism was a mobilising factor in unionism, but that is becoming more marginal today.
At the New Ireland Forum in Dublin in 1983-84, women’s groups from Northern Ireland sought to throw light on what they considered the benighted social backwardness of the Republic.
Only 10 years later, at a centenary celebration of the Warrenpoint Golf Club, where my great-great-uncle had been Honorary Secretary, a mature lady golfer wagged her finger, and told me: “You know, we think the South is full of dangerous feminists”. There are liberal, moderate and conservative strands in all the Churches, but the sectarian divide on socio-moral issues has diminished. It is some time since there was much talk about ‘Rome Rule’, outside an historical context.
The threat today is not mostly long-gone shades of theocracy, but a militant ‘liberalism’, which recognises rights of conscience in only one direction, as illustrated by the case in the NI Court of Appeal which found against a baker, who refused a cake order that carried a campaigning message in favour of gay marriage, not yet legal in Northern Ireland, with which he disagreed.
Politically, a great benefit of the Good Friday Agreement and its successors is the acceptance by the vast majority of people and parties of the necessity to work together and to put past differences and hurts in perspective without first insisting on constitutional finality.
Remarkably, the DUP and Sinn Féin, who had every reason to despise each other, have been able to govern together nearly 10 years without interruption.
There is also growing co-operation in opposition between the UUP and the SDLP, without whom there would have been no agreement, so that the NI electorate have an alternative.
The last few years may seem in retrospect a golden era in British-Irish relations. They are now overshadowed by the unwelcome prospect of Brexit, particularly as no one can predict what will be the outcome of the negotiations.
The firm position of the British Prime Minister Theresa May that everyone has to accept it regardless lays bare the power structure of the United Kingdom, a lopsided English hegemony, which comprises roughly 85% of the population, who mostly have little concern for the outlying parts.
Remarkably, in the 95 years since the advent of devolved government at Stormont, no Northern Ireland MP, unionist or nationalist, has ever been a member of Her Majesty’s Government. Any visible hardening of the border, when the Good Friday Agreement was underpinned by Britain and Ireland’s continuing joint membership of the EU, will be difficult to accept.
The commemoration of the decade of centenaries, which has been open and inclusive, is highlighting other divisions not yet fully healed.
Redmondites and Irish soldiers who fought in the Great War were in opposite camps to the 1916 rebels and post-Rising Sinn Féin, with a barrage of polemics on both sides.
Later, there were civil war divisions. Whatever side we most identify with, it is time to recognise that all made a contribution to national freedom, a never-ending work in progress, and to a new world order which made that possible.