IN HIS powerful recent novel on the psychological legacy of the Troubles, The Truth Commissioner, David Park has a character accuse the people of Northern Ireland of being imprisoned by a history of grievance: "they will give up anything – their wives, their money, their self-respect – before they'll give up their past". The terrible events of recent days, in which two soldiers and a policemen have been killed by self-styled republican paramilitaries, have shown both the relevance and the injustice of that accusation.
We have seen, on the one side, the evidence of a dramatic breach with the past. In the initial wave of disgust and despair, it is easy to lapse into a fatalistic belief that we are trapped in a recurring nightmare of violence. In fact, reactions to the killings have underlined the sheer extent of change. Martin McGuinness’s commendably unequivocal condemnation of the killers as “traitors to the island of Ireland” would have been unimaginable a few years ago. So would Ian Paisley’s description in the House of Commons on Monday of the words of a Catholic priest who led his parishioners in praying for the souls of the dead soldiers as “one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard from a man of the cloth”. As Dr Paisley put it, we are seeing “something we never thought we would see” – not just in the appalling return to political murder, but also in the way reactions to that return have not been split along tribal or sectarian lines.
Yet among that vast majority on the island of Ireland who have no desire to be dragged back into an obscene and futile conflict, there is clearly a dangerous minority that will sacrifice everything – and everybody – except a maniacal loyalty to the past. Beyond the killers themselves, and the vicious little factions of which they are part, there is a wider subculture of support for, or equivocation about, what Republican Sinn Féin yesterday called the “ongoing war against the British”.
The stupidity of such people – their claim to represent a State that has decisively rejected them, their demented fantasies of uniting Ireland by killing those of its people who do not agree with them – should not blind us to the scale of the challenges they present. There is the security challenge of repeating and redoubling the successes of the Garda and the PSNI against them. There is the political challenge of maintaining a united front and not being goaded into the heavy-handed over-reaction that the killers hope to provoke.
Above all, though, there is the challenge of ridding Irish culture of the last vestiges of the sneaking regard for their crude ideology and the murderous methods that flow from it. A part of the price that has been paid for the peace process, and for bringing paramilitary killers in from the cold, has been a reluctance to challenge too strongly the notion that violence was ultimately vindicated. We must acknowledge that paramilitarism achieved nothing for the Irish people over 30 years except blood and tears. It was, and is, a dead end. Those who would revive it must be treated by everyone, of every political persuasion, for what they are: the enemies of democracy, decency and Ireland.