I don’t know that much about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I know that one of my best friends, Paul, grew up in Belfast and that he, a
Catholic, was jumped by a half-dozen Protestant boys when he was 16 and beaten badly, just because he was Catholic. That was 1990.
I know that Betty Williams, the product of a
Catholic-Protestant intermarriage, witnessed a car crash in 1976. The car was driven by an IRA member who’d
been shot by British police, and when he lost control, he struck and killed
three children. I also know that Betty
Williams had two cousins; one was killed by Catholics, and one was killed by
Protestants. The aunt of the three
children who were killed, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, contacted Betty and within
days, the two of them organized a Peace march with over 35,000 people. I met Betty.
She gives good hugs.
I know that there’s a long history of peace and war,
intermarriage, love and hate between Catholics and Protestants, that it goes
back all the way to the British occupation and the Protestant conversion of the
English King Henry VIII, and more recently to the Irish War of Independence,
when a thin Protestant majority in Northern Ireland decided to remain part of
the UK. I only know in the abstract,
academic brand of ‘knowing’ that there were decades of bombs and bullets,
atrocities and concessions on both sides that most people call “The Troubles.”
I believe that there has been some modicum of peace there
for the last fifteen years or so, and that makes me happy, because Ireland sings
in my blood, Northern or Republic of, though I’ve never set foot on the island.
And now I hear that Gerry Adams has been arrested and is
under investigation for a terrible murder that happened forty years ago,
because of an interview for Boston College’s Belfast
oral history project. I guess the interview links Gerry Adams and the Sinn Fein
to Mrs. Jean McConville, who was accused of being an informant and was disappeared
by the IRA, snatched from in front of her children, and that her family has
been seeking justice ever since. It was
a terrible act of violence amidst a sea
of Troubles. I understand the McConville family’s desire
for closure, and their deep need for justice, so often misunderstood for
vengeance.
But here’s something else I know. Peace is fragile. Especially when it’s young, like a seedling,
it is tender and needs nourishment. It
is easily damaged by things like vengeance and hate, which burn like a coal in
the heart for years. So when I see
something of vast historical and academic importance, like the Boston College
Belfast project, something that was launched in the spirit of peace and
reconciliation, according to its director, seized upon to reopen old wounds (or
keep open wounds that have never healed), I have to mourn.
There will always be a need for vengeance. It will always seem easier to continue to
pursue retribution, even for forty years, because there’s a certain defining
certainty to it, than it will be to embrace the uncertainty of trusting those
who have been enemies.
And so my wish for Northern Ireland is as it has
always been: peace. If Gerry Adams has
to go to jail for something that happened forty years ago, that's not for me to say, though I'm sure he's a very different person now than he was then. Truth is an important part of reconciliation,
as the great Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela showed in South Africa. But I also hold the wish that the oral
histories of the IRA and UVF members recorded by Boston College be treasured,
be honored, and if any new light is shed on the Troubles, that it be used to nurture
the fragile seed of peace.
