Protestant statement challenges nationalist prejudices

THERE are now just two weeks before the Apprentice Boys march in Derry, and the days ahead are days of both fear and opportunity. Everyone has seen what happens when people surrender to the drift of events, when they choose to hide their sense of responsibility behind a sense of inevitability and, by letting things take their course, maintain that course will steam ahead for disaster. No one has yet seen" what happens when they choose, instead, to take control of their own history.

On Wednesday, the church and government committee of the Presbyterian Church reminded us that the latter option remains open. In a brave and in the true sense, prophetic statement, it did I what must be done, finding a way to escape the mind set in which compromise and tradition are construed as opposites and suggesting that each "can be integral to the other.

The worst way to misunderstand - and therefore to feed - the crisis in Northern Ireland is to repeat the old cliches about the nightmare of history. Watching the Orangemen, the Royal Black men, and the Apprentice Boys, with their stony insistence on "tradition", it is all too easy to blame the past, to say that these are people locked in history.

The implication of the cliche's is that the past should be forgotten, and that everything would be all right if only they would lighten up and let their traditions slip away into obscurity. That demand, though, will always be resisted, framed as it is in terms that actively invite refusal and intransigence.

What the Presbyterian Church did on Wednesday was something much more profound and significant. Instead of issuing the kind of bland and benign appeal that is always easy to dismiss, it cut away the cliche's and asked the most basic of questions: what is the Protestant tradition? The answer it gave is that the Protestant tradition, stemming from the Reformation is one in which tradition itself is subordinate to justice.

"Jesus", it said, "is the head of the church and he regularly demonstrated his Lordship over traditions. Tradition must serve the purposes of the gospel and of the Kingdom of God. When either is compromised by the demands of tradition, it is a Reformation principle that tradition must be modified or reformed. Failure to do so turns tradition into a false god."

THE language used here is biblical and recognisably Protestant, but the truth it contains is not merely tribal. It is that compromise is a better way of keeping faith with the past than confrontation. To put it in more secular terms, the problem for the unionist community is not that it has too much consciousness of its past, but that it has too little.

Instead of an obsession with the Protestant past, there has actually been a great silence about it. It is all very well to condemn the Orangemen for their insistence on a continual restatement of a certain notion of Protestant and unionist history. But who has tried to replace the false gods of tradition with a truer understanding of the past? If the Apprentice Boys and the Orangemen seem to be replaying one version of history, the intellectuals have failed to give them any others.

If anything, those who write about the recent past have tended, albeit by acts of omission, to collude in an idea of Protestant history that places bigotry and violence at its centre. The historian Alvin Jackson has pointed out (in The Irish Review and more recently in The Making of Modern Irish History, edited by George Boyce and Alan O'Day) the curious imbalance in the historiography of unionism, with much more attention being paid to the wilder shores than to the central plains.

Three substantial books have been written about Ian Paisley, none about Jim Molyneaux, Harry West, Brian Faulkner, or James Chichester Clark, all of whom led a unionist party larger than Paisley's. Several substantial books have been devoted to the history and development of loyalist paramilitary organisations since 1972, none at all, to the Ulster Unionist Party in the same period. Just one book has been devoted to the rule of Terence O'Neill, even though his leadership and its failure are generally agreed to be crucial to any understanding of the unionist dilemma.

"After 25 years of violence", as Jackson puts it, "the plain of unionism, suburban and constitutional, remains apparently more inaccessible than the ganglands stalked by Lenny Murphy."

The history of Protestant politics, even in the very recent past, has been ceded to extremism. And the more distant past has been obscured, not least by Orangeism itself which, by concentrating on a few highlights - the Siege of Derry, the Battle of the Boyne - has effectively denied the importance of much that came after.

Alvin Jackson has written that "the Protestant past is an uncomfortable and ugly garment, and a gaudy Orange sash never fully conceals the stains of denominational conflict, or the patches of class division. Rural Protestant communities in eastern Ulster retain tortured memories of 1798, of the struggle for tenant rights, and of the sectarian rivalries between Presbyterian and Episcopalian." Such memories, precisely because they are painful, have no official expression.

By reminding its members that the core of their religious culture is the idea that traditions must serve human values, not the other way round, the Presbyterian Church has shown how assertions of religious identity and of an affinity with the past can be a part of the solution rather than the problem. And by having the courage to take the rhetoric of its own tradition seriously, it has presented a challenge to Catholics and nationalists to do likewise.

NATIONALISTS must understand that their own case in relation to Orange marches is based on principles that have a much larger application. That case is based on two ideas. One is the principle of consent - the right to march is limited by the need to secure the consent of those who live on the streets you want to march through. The other is the idea that the right to consent is not just a matter of numbers - a minority community can refuse its consent to the wishes of the majority where those wishes threaten the rights of the minority.

Each of these arguments is unanswerable. But neither is accepted by Sinn Fein, which has a leading position in most of the residents associations opposing Orange marches through Catholic areas. Sinn Fein has refused to accept the principle of consent as it relates to the position of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. And its whole political analysis is based on a rejection of "the unionist veto", its term for the idea that the rights of a minority cannot be overridden merely by the counting of numbers.

If the Presbyterian Church starts a fashion for acting in accordance with your own stated beliefs, many nationalists will be forced to conclude that their own arguments in recent weeks about consent and the limits to one community's rights to impose itself on another are worryingly correct.