“We must robustly challenge those who still insist violence was justified…”

In The Irish Times Trevor Ringland challenges an oddly identitarian idea that’s been in vogue recently in ways it was not during the actual Troubles (especially if you had read An Phoblacht regularly) that it was the IRA that brought civil rights.

This odd philosophy (which the comedian Andrew Doyle correctly acknowledges is present in both mainstream right and left discourses elsewhere) associates wrong doing, not by the individuals responsible, but layered for guilt primarily by identity.

This has been part of the discourse around legacy almost since the ink on the Belfast Agreement was barely dry. Here Ringland lays out how the preferences of the interests of some victims over others has its roots in an oddly twisted narrative of the past:

Some years ago, I challenged a leading Sinn Féin member at a public meeting because I believed he was going into schools to repeat the narrative that the IRA campaign of brutal violence was necessary and justified. Returning home, I rang the late senator Maurice Hayes. Was I wrong, I asked? He told me, as I knew he would, that “nothing had been achieved by violence that could not otherwise have been achieved peacefully”. Though perhaps not easily.

That is a proper basis for relations between the people of Northern Ireland and with the people of the Republic. We were fortunate to avoid a civil war. We should never take such a risk again. Saying that violence outside the law to promote a particular constitutional demand was wrong, unjustifiable and unnecessary is a small price to pay for better relations, even if it upsets the vanity of those who hold this view of history.

It was those in Northern Ireland who kept community ties alive while others tried to destroy them who ultimately won the argument, assisted by the security forces who lost a thousand dead and thousands injured, and by a working legal system. The vast majority of the people of Northern Ireland refused to go where the extremes wished to take us, no matter how others seek to rewrite the history now.

He goes on…

In 1998, the Irish government drew a line under the past. Yet republicans and wider nationalism have kept a focus on the actions of the British state forces, while keeping a veil over their own acts – and insisting on their rights to be involved politically. Yes, there were acts by the British army, the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Royal Ulster Constabulary that were wrong, particularly in the early years of the Troubles as they struggled to deal with the violence taking place on our streets. No reasonable unionist contests that.

However, the insistence of republicans to demand light on one group of acts, but not others, was always going to compromise handling the past. More than 700 murders of NI security forces remain unsolved, out a total of the 1,420 who were killed. Is there a clamour for truth and justice from those families? Yes, there is, but it is quietly made and mostly ignored. The Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery should offer those families an honest opinion on what truth and justice they can hope to get.

He believes that whilst this narrative has had its wins, its justifications of a violent past which refuse to accept those whose liberal decency kept us all from tearing each other apart means it is the latter who continue to frame the terms of peace:

…the Provisional IRA’s campaign was not about civil rights. It was about driving people such as me “into the sea”. A million of us remain, and we remain tied to the land that we love, that we call home.

The current constitutional model on the island of “separate but together” is working. The 2023 Northern Ireland Life and Times survey indicates that 78 per cent of people in Northern Ireland are “content”, while only 5 per cent are not.

Politics remains, and will always remain, a work in progress. However, much quiet work is being done to encourage pro-union parties to provide good government, to build on the ties with the Republic and the rest of the UK. We must robustly challenge those who still insist violence was justified.

Declaration of interest: Trevor Ringland has been a long term friend of Mick’s ever since they worked together with David Steven on Slugger’s first publication, A Long Peace: The Future of Unionism in Northern Ireland.

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty