Learning from the past and putting it behind us

It sounds hypocritical to a lot of people to hear Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness condemn the murder of PSNI constable Ronan Kerr during the week.

But what would they have them do? Keep their mouths shut? Perhaps they would prefer if Adams and McGuinness condoned the murder.
That, of course, would make it very simple for those who don’t want to know where the leaders of Sinn Féin today are coming from. It was a slow process – from armed resistance to democratic politics. It was a path followed previously by some of the founders of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and also by some in the leadership of the Labour Party.
It makes Sinn Féin’s position in the Dáil today very difficult to understand for those who have not studied the course of Irish history and especially of Irish Republicanism from the time of the Fenians to the present day. Yesterday’s terrorists become today’s democrats. As the Fenians and the Invincibles grew old they joined the Land League and the National Party, just as old IRA men joined Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and today’s Sinn Féin.
It is not easy to keep training with young men and risking your freedom and your life itself after you have married and started to raise a family. You begin to see at that stage that laying down your life for the cause might not be the best way forward.
Surely most of us would agree that more was achieved in Northern Ireland over the past 10 years of peace than in the previous 30 years of bloodshed. Some may argue that it was the IRA’s armed struggle that forced the British to the conference table. But was it worth 3,000 lives? Did the whole armed struggle not drive Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist, further apart than ever before?
You may have them sitting down together in the Northern Executive at Stormont but they had no choice. Still, as they say, jaw jaw is better than war war.
When Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness joined the IRA – pay no heed to Gerry Adams’s denials – more than 40 years ago, things were far different to what they are today. Catholics were second-class citizens. The governments in London and Dublin just didn’t want to know. Then, when they marched for their civil rights, they were beaten with batons by the police and their homes were burned down by loyalist mobs.
People such as Adams and McGuinness saw no alternative but to join the IRA. I will not condemn them for doing that. I worked as a newspaper reporter in Belfast in the early 1970s and saw with my own eyes what was happening. I believe the IRA was wrong. I believe some terrible things were done during the long years of armed struggle. The IRA brought down some terrible misery on their own people.
But I can understand how it all started up. A lot of people in deprived areas felt they had nobody else to turn to but the IRA. So I am very slow to condemn what happened during those years. However, that was then. One might argue that there was some justification for the IRA campaign in the early days, wrong though it may have been. Nobody with a brain in his head could argue in favour of violence today.
What possible justification can there be for the shooting dead of a young Catholic man who joined the PSNI, a police force that is of the community and for the community. They want to frighten other Catholics from joining up. They want the PSNI to become like the old RUC, an arm of Unionist supremacy waiting for a chance to batten the croppies into submission once again.
They want to drag this country back to the bad old days. They think the peace process was a disaster. They think that all it will take now is just another little push and Britain will be forced to pull all its troops out of this country. But there is no logic to their thinking.
Another big difference between the past and the present in Northern Ireland is that while the Provisional IRA had strong support in nationalist areas, there is no such support for any of the various dissident groups.
They cannot succeed without the support of local communities. They can argue that the men of 1916 had no support and that the IRA had no support in the 1960s. But, as I have said, circumstances have changed entirely since then. Catholics, Nationalists and Republicans are today treated equally with Protestants, Unionists and Loyalists.
There cannot be any return to the bad old days when you had a Protestant province for a Protestant people. I do not believe that either government in London in Dublin would tolerate such an occurrence. Not to mention the people of the Republic.
There is no going back but the problem is how to explain that to the people who want to go there. Gerry Adams has offered to talk to them but they hate Adams more than they hate the Unionist leadership. They have rejected previous offers of talks from Adams.
Sinn Féin is in a terribly awkward position because no matter what the party does it will be condemned. Even when Mary Lou McDonald joined in the all-party condemnation of Michael Lowry in the Dáil, she was accused of being a hypocrite in the light of Sinn Féin’s history.
But Sinn Féin will have to persevere. For them there is surely no going back either. The party will have to continue condemning violence, murder, bank robberies and corruption and ignore the taunts of its opponents, just as Fianna Fáil did in the years after the Civil War.
We have all to look to the future and while we must learn from the past we must also learn to put the past, behind us.