All they can offer is peace
Mary Kenny
The Peace Movement goes on—not only in Northern Ireland—but all over the small towns of the Republic. Each week the reports come in : 2,000 in Killarney, 5,000 in Athlone, plans for Clara and Athy and Ballyjamesduff. Echoes drift up from the midlands, the south, the west, the godforsaken little places where nothingallegedly ever happens, the dark little bogland towns that Irish novelists write about as allegories of the inertia and melancholy of the human Spirit. There is evident support for the peace marches; but you find cynicism too, notably among the Dublin Smart Set. 'Once it was Bridge for bored housewives—now they're all gone mad organising peace rallies.' The Dublin bourgeoisie find their little quarrels amusing—whether, for example, it is permissible to use the slogan 'Peace with Justice without Violence', since the Provisional IRA have already copyrighted the Phrase 'Peace with Justice'. You hear it condemned as 'middle-class' by people who could not be anything else themselves, just as the radical-chic fellow-travellers of the Provos condone the murder of Ewart-Biggs on the grounds that he, too, was 'only' middle-class.
The proof, I have heard it said in Dublin, that the peace marches are middle-class lies in the fact that they are held on d Saturday, When working-class women do their shopping; if they were to take place on a Sunday, now, that would be proletarian. Excuse piles on excuse; a kinsman of mine was put off by hearing one of the peace women talk, on the BBC, of 'Londonderry'. Nobody who loves Ireland talks of 'Londonderry', the conqueror's name for Doire Colm Chille, or 'Derry'. And of course, they are all being encouraged by the BBC. If the BBC approves, It can't be right. It certainly can't be Irish. 'The British media is doing a highly irresponsible thing in encouraging these peace women,' a left-wing radical in Dublin told me. `They are leading people to imagine that the so-called peace women can offer people something. But they have no solutions. All they can offer is peace.'
All they can offer is peace. A humane view might be that this is something to be going on with, and it is as plain as plain can be that despite the islands of mocking cynicism— endemic, anyway, to the Irish way of thinking—that that is the majority view of the southern Irish. Ask the window cleaner, the hairdresser, the farmer at the fair, the teacher, the doctor. the shop assistant, the trade unionist. The manifestations for peace all over the little towns of the Republic are in fact the first real evidence of any sense of active involvement in the Six County troubles. A dark cloud of depression hung over southern Ireland in the few days after 'Bloody Sunday', in 1972, when thirteen Catholics were shot down by the Paratroopers, and that feeling of emotion represented the height of emotional identity with the North. But even that didn't bring out marches in the streets, the way the peace people have done.
Indeed, the despair of Northerners, both Catholic and Protestant, has constantly been the apparent sense of remoteness in the Republic from the Northern troubles. Pockets of Provos and bank-robbers might exist, and Dundalk, just inside the border, might have borne the mark of a 'Republican' (shorthand, now, for pro-IRA) town, but the majority in the South have never really involved themselves, and Ulstermen are often heard to be bitter about the 'ostrichlike' mentality of southern Ireland. When the British Ambassador was killed, grief swept the Republic, and much of that grief actually provoked anger in Belfast. The Protestant Belfast Newsletter was angriest of all; what did one Englishman count against so many Ulstermen who had died ? But southern sorrow at that one Englishman's death persisted. Atavism always counts with the Irish, too; there is a Celtic tradition that you give hospitality to a stranger, even if you are at war with brethren.
As the Provisionals will be the first to say, it is history that counts, indeed, with the Irish, and the profound sense of the continuity of their history determines much of what happens in Ireland. The Irish are forever sitting around and saying, 'What is it to be Irish ? What does it mean ?' I have sat with young students in a Dublin pub while they reconstructed the Battle of Kinsale (1601), using an empty Guinness bottle to represent the Spanish troops and an old cigarette packet signifying the position of Mountjoy, the English commander, and a salt-cellar showing how O'Neill advanced. This famous sense of Iiistory may sometimes be obsessive, but it can be useful too; I wish the English did it more-1 wish English people asked themselves, 'What is it to be English?' and replayed the Battle of Waterloo similarly. But perhaps you never replay battles you win. Yet it seems to me that history explains so much; and history certainly explains why the southern Irish people will not identify themselves in the northern troubles, except to ask for peace.
Southern Ireland has, for very many centuries, been the poorest part of Ireland. The peasant-farmer, who is the backbone of the southern Irish economy, has, for a long time, in the race-memory of his family, lived off the smell of an oil-rag. All eighteenth and nineteenth-century travellers to what is now
the Republic wrote about the abject poverty of the people. 'There never was,' said the Duke of Wellington, 'a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.' He was talking about the area we now call the Republic. In Ulster, by contrast, life was not anything like so bad. Not only was there relative prosperity—witnessed by the fact that the great famine scarcely touched that province—but what we now call civil rights were much more advanced. The National Movement in the south was fuelled more by the injustice of the system of leasing land than by any other single factor ; but in the province of Ulster, tenant rights were much more secure and the Devon Commission of 1843 reported that the superior prosperity and tranquillity of Ulster were due to a more equitable system of tenant right. In the nineteenth century, relative harmony between Catholics and Protestants existed in Belfast ; by the middle of the century the Orange Order was at its lowest ebb, and there was quite a fashion among the Protestants to learn Irish.
The economic balance, between northern and southern Ireland, has only altered in this century, and only been substantially realised since the Second World War. Indeed, the generation of people under forty in the Republic now is the first generation to have known anything like prosperity on a wide scale. Since entry into the Common Market, the Irish farmer has actually become rich; the common agricultural policy. devised in the interest of French farmers, has coincidentally benefited their Irish counterparts. Estate agents in Dublin, where property is still bullish, say that a major source of investment in real estate comes from the farming community, whose atavistic instincts tell them to acquire land. In short, southern Ireland, though theoretically in grave economic difficulties similar to Great Britain's, is nevertheless in the eyes of its own people no longer abjectly poor. There is an embryonic welfare state, with unemployment pay, social security and a limited national health, and people are not obliged to emigrate any more. 'And there is a feeling about all this, says Joseph O'Malley, a political and economic commentator, 'that what we have, now, we hold.' And it is not about to be risked for the uncertain chimera of a united Ireland. The southern Irish identity has altered and matured, said Professor John Murphy of the University of Cork in a paper given just over a week ago; the drive in the south towards social progress has alienated the southern Irish from the idea of a one-nation state with the north. 'The [southern Irishman] has outgrown emotional manifestations of nationalism. The embarrassment of the southerner when he sees the Tricolours and nationalist shrines in Derry's Bogside or when he is faced with the Northern nationalist's classic complaint of abandonment by the Free State is evidence of the gulf that has widened between Nationalists North and South.' What we have, we hold.
Those who have predicted looming civil war in Ireland have been wrong. It seems to me, both from the evidence of history and the evidence of everyday observation in the Republic, that nothing could now make this happen, with the single exception of a really broad-scale, sudden and unprovoked massacre of a large number of Catholics in the Six Counties. And it seems unlikely that even the Protestant terrorists are stupid enough to do that.
A few young radicals in Dublin say that the time will come when the apparent selfishness of the south in keeping its head in the sand will have to be repaid; it's true that Ireland is an exceptionally young country with the highest proportion of people under fifty of any Common Market country (it can pay to ban contraception). And young countries are usually countries with the greatest potential for change. But it will take some time for all that to come to a head, and by then, perhaps the peace movement will have produced something more than 'just' peace. Political structures have grown before from the will of the people; leaders have emerged before from that will who have known how to call the gunmen in. And it is a rule that anything that has happened before, in Ireland. nearly always happens again.
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