Introduction: Exile & Homecoming
Derek Poole

From the Ardoyne Road...
Norman Hamilton

From the Director
David Porter

Exile and Homecoming
David McMillan

Be Careful What You Wish For
Gareth Higgins

Bonfire Reflections
Alwyn Thomson

Rights, Relationships and Responsibilities
Kelvin McCracken

Wilson On Suffering
Alan Wilson

Poems

Faith and Practice - Debbie Watters
Ruth Hutchinson

Forgiveness
Janet Morris

< Past Issues Archive

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
A new northern Irish identity, or a Celtic Tiger’s breakfast?

During the past thirty years of civil conflict, if you had asked a northern Irish person who they were and what their identity meant to them, likely as not, you would have heard more about what their identity didn’t mean. It has long been apparent that the peoples of northern Ireland have tended to define themselves as much in terms of what they are not as what they are. (I use the terms ‘northern Irish’ and ‘northern Ireland’ as an attempt to address the controversy over what this people and place are actually called.) For many, ‘the Troubles’ caused us to ‘lead lives of quiet desperation’, constrained to invest ourselves in crisis management rather than living creatively. A constituent part of this has been that Protestant/British and Catholic/Irish identity have continued to be predicated on a zero-sum competition (real or imagined) between two notions of ‘nationality’ or ethnic identity, each of which were until recently pledged to squeeze out the space for each other’s legitimacy.

To the caricaturist, Northern Ireland has consisted of two types of indoctrinated people, including the ‘blunt Prods’ who know what they want and know that they’re right, the romantic Republicans who will sacrifice to defend the ‘most oppressed people ever’, and the horse-owning species known as ‘Cultra wo/man’, to be spotted at the yacht club claiming that they don’t understand and have no responsibility for the mess we’re in. Of course these are stereotypes, and there are many more people groups than these in this society, but it is true to say that identity in northern Ireland, while complex and partly rooted in real fear, trauma, and competing ideas, has to a large extent reflected the indoctrinated stereotyping of others.

A stereotypical view of the conflict claims that it has been a religious war between two intransigent ideologies with a high faith- or myth-based content. Although this view is unnecessarily simplistic -what about the role of Britain or the pro-reconciliation faith communities - it is important to acknowledge the role that religion has played in structuring the boundaries that have kept us apart and reinforced the logic of the conflict. boundaries that have kept us apart and reinforced the logic of the conflict.

From the Plantation in the sixteenth century through Partition in the 1920’s through Good Friday 1998, ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Catholicism’ have meant things to the people of Ireland that have no resonance anywhere else in the world. The reason why ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ have remained salient markers of identity for so long in northern Ireland is that no other significant lines of social cleavage emerged to compete. The pluralistic lines of cleavage (class, gender, race, etc.) that have emerged in other Western societies did so as a result of factors such as industrialisation and immigration, whereas such processes did not occur, or actually reinforced the sectarian social structure in northern Ireland. Early industrialisation merely continued Protestant/Catholic difference in northern Ireland, as Protestants were ‘shooed in’ to better jobs, and the island’s isolated geographical position on the edge of Europe has meant that it has been a launching pad for emigrants, eager to escape to the American dream or Australian city life, or Scottish universities, rather than the first choice potential destination for immigrants from other places! But all this may be changing…

We may feel that the word ‘historical’ is in danger of over-use these days, and not without cause. Tony Blair’s ‘hand of history’ may well have been on our collective shoulder in April 1998, but an epidemic of ‘peace-process fatigue’ gradually broke out as the initial euphoria which greeted the Belfast Agreement was replaced first by very cautious optimism, then frustration at the interminable period of argument about the ‘D-word’, and finally a sense of annual summer dread that we might be headed back to what have been termed (with characteristic Blairite understatement) ‘the dark days’. This fatigue contributed to the almost universal lack of celebration (more party poopers than poppers) when the Executive was finally set up, followed by the various institutions that are meant to formalise the peace. However, the early stages of the Executive’s existence were characterised by scenes that would have been thought inconceivable even a short while ago: Martin McGuinness at his desk in Bangor (is he the new Cultra man?), David Trimble and Seamus Mallon, seated next to each other, answering questions in the Assembly, and the venerable Gerry Fitt suggesting that the Orange Order/Garvaghy Road question should be settled by the tossing of a coin!

This is imperfect, but progressive politics, which seems to have the potential to gradually cement the possibilities for peace and prosperity about which Messrs Blair, Ahern and Clinton constantly wax lyrical. But a problem and an opportunity are presenting themselves here, which Christians must take seriously. If we didn’t know who we were before, our identity is more than ever being prescribed for us by forces beyond our control – the ‘peace junkies’ in the British, Irish, and American governments, the media, and international public opinion has now pigeon-holed us as ‘the people who have just had a peace process and to whom we all have to be nice for the time being’. We are told that now it is time to ‘bury the past’ and ‘move on’ to the promised land of peace and prosperity. The joint efforts of those good-natured Europeans and Americans who, of course, only have our best interests at heart, along with the Celtic Tiger, are sure to lead to lots of jobs and greater material comfort for us all, and then won’t we all want to forget that nasty stuff about sectarian hatred, and physical violence being seen as the normal way of dealing with political/ideological disputes and questions of justice? Statutory bodies throw money, possibly just inflated promises of money, at victims’ groups, sometimes apparently in the hope that they too might disappear into the past. And, so the received wisdom goes, our grandchildren will grow up in a society where the trauma of thirty, or eighty, or four hundred, or eight hundred years, is a distant memory.

But this ‘vision of the future’ is as simplistic as the stereotyped ideas of Ireland’s past. We will not deal with the past by forgetting it. Psychologists tell us that dysfunctional families must return to the source of their trauma, and face it, including the possibility of apology and the offer of forgiveness before they are able to find stability. The same is true for the ‘family’ of the peoples of northern Ireland – we must not deny or bury the past. To attempt to do so would be to create a hostage to fortune – to simply suppress our society’s nature as a dysfunctional family writ large, and make it ready to explode again. Only when we have begun to face our past, and take responsibility for how we have lived will we be able to develop a northern Irish identity of which we can be proud. We have a choice – to deny the past and our collective responsibility for our collective trauma, or to take responsibility for the process of apology and reconciliation that must occur at individual and communal level.

As we emerge from decades of crisis management, we are rather like the university graduate faced with a myriad of choices, along with the knowledge that pursuing one choice will shut the others down. Northern Irish identity will be in a state of flux for some time to come, but choices made now will reverberate beyond the lifetimes of even the youngest person reading this article. As the Jewish Christian philosopher Simone Weil said, “We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say ‘I’”. It is the exercise of this choice by each of us as individuals that will determine our future together. The people of God are not exempt from this responsibility.

Will we trample over the pain of our society’s wounded because they shame us into remembering the past, or will we dignify all those who have suffered by including them in our new society, and seeking to walk their broken paths together? Will we choose to feed our well-known lack of service culture and ‘I’m all right Jack’ social attitudes, or will we allow our collective experience of trauma to be transformed into deeper compassion for all who suffer in our world? Will we allow ourselves to be swamped by the materialistic technophilia of multi-national corporate investment and soulless jobs, or will we refuse this by embracing our Celtic creativity and appreciation of the natural world, time we can enjoy and air we can breathe? Will we re-focus our bigotry onto other groups, now that Protestant/Catholic sectarianism is supposed to be a thing of the past, or will we take seriously the call to build a pluralist society for a pluralist people, where discrimination on the basis of religion (Hindu?) and race (Chinese?) and gender and age and sexual orientation is not only illegal but genuinely anathema to all? Will we plunge headlong into busier lives, for better pay and shorter life-spans, owning more things than we could possibly need or use, or will we choose lifestyles which prefer to suck the marrow of friendship and community, valuing that which cannot simply be bought at Habitat or Sainsbury?

At the time of writing, we have only a kind of stability in our society, not yet peace nor reconciliation. But we also have a magnificent creative opportunity to choose what we want to be – a fresh start. Nobel Peace Laureate and President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel wrote from prison that ”...responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of being that story of the fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is”. Across the complexities of the northern Irish peoples, from the stereotypical to the extraordinary, we can remain prisoners of the ‘isms’ of the past, doing violence to ourselves by embracing exclusive and easily categorised ideological identities. Or we can acknowledge, with Havel, that “... one’s identity is never in one’s possession as something given, completed and unquestionable”, and that “... responsibility does establish identity, but we are not responsible because of our identity; instead we have an identity because we are responsible”. To be northern Irish will certainly mean something different in the future than it has meant for most of us in the past and until now. And it is those who take responsibility who will define that identity. This is what Christ calls us to – to show the way by living as if the kingdom of God has already come. Those who have (often heroically) worked for peace, and those who would follow, must now transform their crisis management into the creative incarnation of the hope of what we could be. I don’t know what that will look like, but if the church does not lead the way in this, someone else will.

Gareth Higgins is a Belfast based research consultant and director of the ZERO:28 Project - a post-sectarian peace building initiative.