A Catholic man sent me an email recently recounting an experience he had in the Bogside in 1969. He and some others were behind the "Free Derry" barricade, looking after refugees from the fighting. On the third night, he saw an RUC man go up in flames from a petrol-bomb.
The crowd - men, women and children - laughed when the RUC man began screaming for his mother. My correspondent wrote, "Just for a moment, I laughed too, until I remembered that he was a human being, burning in front of me."
The RUC man, protected by his greatcoat, was out of hospital in three days. But the memory has never left the man who emailed me. He still shudders when he thinks how quickly evil can break through in any of our lives.
Mary McAleese did not say on January 27th that Protestants were Nazi-like. Nor did she equate the situation in Northern Ireland with the horrors of Hitler's Germany, or with concentration camps. Instead, she made exactly the same point that my correspondent makes above. Given the right circumstances, any of us, even those who consider ourselves to be good human beings, can act in a way that is morally reprehensible and repugnant.
Let's look at what she actually said. The now infamous remarks were made in response to a question on Morning Ireland. Áine Lawlor commented that it was important to remember that something like Auschwitz simply starts with intolerance, with not caring about someone's humanity because they are part of a group.
Mary McAleese agreed, and went on to say that the Nazis did not invent anti-Semitism. They used it, and built on it, but they did not invent it. For generations, for centuries, otherwise apparently good people, some of whom would have considered themselves good Christians, instilled in their children an irrational hatred of Jews.
That hatred was focused and brought to its abhorrent conclusion by Nazism, but Nazism could never have taken root as it did, if the ground had not been prepared long before.
She went on to illustrate her point. She said, for example, that the kind of anti-Semitism which under the right circumstances the Nazis were able to exploit, was similar to the irrational and outrageous hatred for Catholics which people (she did not use the word Protestants) in Northern Ireland instilled in their children.
Later on in the broadcast, she used another example. She said that evil could stalk the streets of Dublin, so that a little Somali child could be pelted with eggs simply because of her race. Oddly, we did not have outraged telephone calls from Dubliners saying that she had compared them to Nazis and that she should apologise abjectly. Her point was that evil is a toxin, and that if we tolerate even a weakened strain of that toxin, in time it will become virulent. Of course she should have acknowledged sectarianism among Catholics, or even just the ability, in Áine Lawlor's phrase, not to care about someone's humanity because they are part of a group.
Just such an ability to see someone only as an enemy, and not as a human being, is amply illustrated in the anecdote about the RUC man.
Nevertheless, does a person's record stand for nothing? Few people have worked so consistently for peace and reconciliation as Mary and Martin McAleese. Yet all that quiet perseverance was judged to have been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by one slip. It is one of the nastier aspects of the society in which we live, that mistakes are seized upon with what often appears like glee.
That attitude is in itself a toxin, and is part of what John Habgood called a few years ago a "culture of contempt." It is always easier to break down than to build up. It is always easier to join the ranks of righteously indignant and outraged, than to really listen to what someone is saying.
When a major work on sectarianism by Joseph Leichty and Cecilia Clegg was published a few years ago, the comment was made to the authors that it would make Protestants feel defensive, and Catholics feel smug. Objectively speaking, there has been more virulent sectarianism in the Protestant community than there has been in the Catholic community. It is hard, for example, to think of an equivalent of the Orange Order in Catholicism. It is hard to imagine Catholics filling balloons of urine to throw at terrified Protestant children.
But in itself that is no great credit to Catholics. The reality is that a dominant community is going to have more opportunities for oppression than the minority community. Somewhat paradoxically, when a dominant community begins to lose its power, they may become even more vicious in response to a perceived threat, which in part explains what happened at the blockade of Holy Cross school.
Another reason for Catholics to resist feeling smug is that while there may have been less sectarianism, that is, hatred of another because of his or her religion, there was plenty of hatred based on politics. We are all tainted with it. Irish people who do not have some residue of reflex anti-British feeling are rare. The frightening reality that none of us wishes to face, is that our prejudice is part of a continuum, which at its extreme results in the kind of scarcely-veiled threats which the IRA delivered this week. It is far easier to see such threats as the work of people who bear no resemblance whatsoever to us.
The response to Mary McAleese may have been so strong because it is easier to be righteously indignant and outraged, than it is to face the unpalatable truth that she suggested. Her summary of the message of the Holocaust is disquieting.
"The lesson of Nazism, of the second World War, is that there but for the grace of God go I."
Secularise that message if it makes you more comfortable, but reflect on it. The Nazis were not monsters, but men and women who allowed themselves to act in a monstrous fashion. Human beings succumb to barbarism. If we insist that this capacity is only found in people not like us, we come closer to, not further away from, surrendering to evil.