VIEWPOINT
A land of trouble
GEORGE GALE
Where are the priests, where are the ministers of religion? Are they in the cross-fire, appeal- ing for peace? They are not. They are with 'their own people', they have sides, they comfort and exhort their own. What it is about, in part, is what they preach. Preach- ing their own interpretations, they commend division and the myths they propagate issue in bloody violence. Despite all its protesta- tions to the contrary, Christianity has always been a bloody religion, whether crusading against infidels, or persecuting Jews, or sup- pressing heresy with the rack and stake, or turning nation against nation or brother against brother. It has preached peace and made wars.
I do not suppose for one moment that Christianity is the sole, or even the chief, cause of the disasters now falling upon Northern Ireland: such a supposition would flatter the role of superstition in social life, and this is a form of flattery in which I would prefer not to indulge. In a coarse kind of historical view, it could be regarded that the English imported the (Presbyterian) Scotch to colonise the native (Catholic) Irish of Ulster. Racially, such an historical de- velopment is all but impossible to disentangle. It's not much use talking about the Celts, those little swarthy men who currently in- habit bits of Brittany, Cornwall, West Wales and Connemara. To all political intents and purposes, there are no Celts left; and most of the survivors prefer not to speak English.
Ireland, as much as Scotland and Wales and England, is chiefly composed of Angles and Saxons and Danes and a few French- men, with doubtless a taint of Roman blood left behind as well as that touch of the Celtic tarbrush. We are all mongrels now: as we have all been mongrels then. It is not a matter of race. It is, in fact, a matter of history, or of pride. The Scotch Anglo- Saxons were brought over to Ireland by the English Anglo-Saxons in order to put, and then to keep, the Irish Anglo-Saxons in their place. That place was lowly, subsidiary, in- ferior. It is the inbred and educated con- sciousness of the native-born and (which is more to the point) native-bred Irishmen that they are inferior, or are thought to be in- ferior, to the oversea, foreign, or English Scotch, who arrange the best jobs and houses and pensions and so forth, that splits the place. The fact that those of Scotch ex- traction are of the Presbyterian persuasion, while those of indigenous (which is to say, pre-Scotch, pre-1660) extraction are of the Catholic, lends to their communal enmity a plausible patina of traditional respectability. You can throw a petrol bomb, or hurl a stone, if you can pretend that your hooligan- ism is all in the name of Christianity, or of civil rights, in a way you could not do if all you were saying is 'I am a thug'.
They profess adherence to Christianity. Not being myself a Christian—not having the gall or the impertinence to proclaim my ad- herence to a creed which, ostensibly preach- ing peace, goes around making war—I do not much care that both Devlin and Paisley are Christians. They could indeed hardly be anything else, given the Irish state of affairs. In France, say, they might differ over some such splitting of marxist hairs. In Africa the Paisleys and the Devlins would correspond to a pair of tribes, the one tribe being the traditional warrior tribe which fell to the shotguns of the whites but retained in defeat a kind of flyblown dignity, the other tribe being that which, previously kept down by the warriors, seized the opportunity afforded by the advent of the white conquerors to learn the white men's skills, chiefly so as to defeat, upon the white men's departure, the unskilled sullen warriors who had once tyrannised them. In Ireland, the split, the difference that marks out their allegiance.
the invisible (since they all look alike) de- marcation, is about religion, for want—for the literal want—of anything better to argue and to differ about.
Religions, dogma, creeds: there are the words and the phrases and, if you like, the traditions, which make people like Devlin and Paisley feel that they are righteous in their anger and entitled with rash profligacy to cause the spilling of the blood of foolish and inflamed followers and enemies. If Christianity did not exist, it could be argued that it would be necessary to invent it. I am not so sure, however, that any such invention would serve half as well. Christianity does, indubitably, sound respectable. We are all brought up, Catholics and Protestants and humanist agnostics, willy-nilly, to accept that what is Christianity is respectable and that respectability is what is Christian. Thus the stone-throwing idiots and hooligans of the Shankhill Road and of Bogside and so forth are enabled to convince themselves that there is a kind of Christian, which is to say, good and noble and self-evidently righteous, justi- fication in their wild and ignorant violence.
It is not exactly Christianity that is in common. It is the religious way of thinking. It is the belief that is in cOmmon, and that leads to slaughter.
They march up and down, these wretched believers. There is an appallingly sad childishness about their marching up and down. Remember the Germans, marching up and down, making their Hitlerian salutes, roaring their silly phrases, stamping their foolish feet, doing, later, their hideous deeds? The Russians did it, the Russians do it, each May day and each November. The A cans do it and the French. The Chin it, to characteristic excess. We do it r like toy-soldiers, trooping the Colour, brating the Queen's birthday: we do not it convincingly. but instead do it for tourist because, as Dean Acheson said, we have lost an Empire and have not found a role. But should we find an empire, or a role, then have no doubt : we shall do our marching up and down again properly.
There is a true poverty about it all, about such marchings, a poorness. The same poverty, the same almost illiterate poorness of upbringing, characterises the marchings of the Apprentice Boys bearing their banners and the ceremonious processionals of Italian villagers bearing their plaster saints. The village streets look the same, poor. The same intellectual squalor breeds men who rejoice in the jewelled robes of bishops and the black and shiny cars of commissars. There is nothing to be had but pity, for all deluded believers. They know no better. They have been taught no better. Given their upbring- ing, they could have done no better. They shoot each other. They stone each other. They burn each other's houses.
If they must exercise a religious life, I'd like to think they could exercise the English form: this tolerable way, like a slow-moving stream filled with lazing fish. A religious way which few take seriously, other than as a part of moving slowly through one's seventy years; and those few being monks, who seek no strife. The myth the English in England seek has to do. I'd like to assert, with trees and lichen, old empty churches, village fetes, rustic sermonisings, home-made jams and prize cucumbers,-If only this myth. this harmless dotty parochial ideal, could be exported! This would he a fine role for us to find, to export the elision of excitement and the cultivation of repose.
What Ireland wants, in such terms, far more than anything else, far more than soldiers, far more than advice, far far far more than the likes of Devlin and Paisley, far more indeed than priests who move into the cross-fire, appealing for peace, what Ireland wants is a legion of priests desirous of furthering the noblest of all priestly aims, that is, the abnegation of their magic authority. What Ireland wants, far more than anything else, is a legion of priests and ministers of religion all cast from the noble mould of the Vicar of Bray. Then, and per- haps only then, could religion decline into its proper place as one of the minor solaces of the deprived; and such peculiar problems as Ireland possesses then be dealt with, coolly and quietly, without idiotic noise, without blood and strife, without Christians stoning and firing each other.
In more practical, but equally impractic- able, terms, it is not really the pubs of Northern Ireland which should be closed, but the churches. As a step in the right direction, and so that the next generation may not be quite so bloody-minded as the present and past generations, all religious instruction in the schools should be banned forthwith: not only on the general ground that the brainwashing of infants and juniors is a gross evil, but also on the more speCific ground that the festering ills of sectarianism be remedially treated and that a new generation be permitted to grow up un- infected and undiseased by those rival strains of leprosy currently endemic in the sad green island of Ireland.
It is otherwise soldiers. It will be soldiers.
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