Exploring the contrasting perspectives on the root causes of the Troubles, and the need to plot the best way forward
One of the main criticisms I get on social media is that I overlook British oppression and, to be fair, I do actually find it difficult to believe that Britain has an ideological commitment to oppressing me as an Irish person.
Newton Emerson — an Irish Times columnist you should read if you don’t already — parsed recent Sinn Féin statements on the eve of Michelle O’Neill’s trip to Washington and found in them a determination to blame the current DUP boycott of Stormont on the British government.
This was getting things ‘arse about face’ as my father would have said. Newton went for the cart and horse metaphor.
The boycott can certainly be linked back to calamitously stupid decisions taken by Boris Johnson but it can hardly be argued that the present government wants the DUP to stay out of Stormont, or even that Boris’s balls-up was part of a deliberate effort to abuse the Irish.
The Sinn Féin analysis of the cause of all woes in Ireland is that Britain is an imperial oppressor and that Ireland should be united into a single jurisdiction to free us from the coloniser.
And in recent times the feeling of being colonised has been stronger because of a Brexit decision being taken, effectively, by an English majority against our will.
And there were grotesque atrocities by British security forces in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, most notably Bloody Sunday, when 14 unarmed civil-rights protesters were gunned down by soldiers of the parachute regiment.
But was Britain ever really, in modern times, the enemy?
When we look back to the start of the civil rights movement we find the protesters calling on Britain to intervene and impose British standards of governance on the unionists.
The civil rights movement was different from the IRA in this respect: that the movement appealed to Britain as an ally in the cause of democracy while the IRA saw Britain as an invader.
As the Troubles unfolded towards a peace deal in 1998 this contrast shifted, and republicans too began to see a British prime minister, Tony Blair, as a partner in the work of creating a constitutional compromise with unionism.
You can see that change in republican thinking by comparing two separate accounts Gerry Adams has written about his attempt to escape from internment in 1973.
In the earlier version the soldiers who beat and taunt him are British. In the later version they are bigoted northern Protestants. An added detail he provides; a British soldier comes into his cell to comfort him and gives him a cigarette as he quivers in fear.
I compare the stories more fully in my biography: Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life (Faber 2017).
Both stories are propaganda around the same event and yet the target has shifted from the sinister Brits to the intransigent unionists.
Bloody Sunday was a remarkable event in the history of the civil rights effort to bring Britain creatively into play.
In one sense it was the end of that line of thinking for a generation.
British soldiers had unleashed their savagery as in other colonies and impressed us with a sense that we could never be seen by them as fellow citizens of equal status, equally deserving of rights and citizenship.
But that shock hit Britain too, and while the initial response was to cover up and deny that there had been murder on the streets, the government moved rapidly to undo the damage and the embarrassment that its own army had brought upon it.
So we got Lord Widgery’s enquiry — which Prime Minister Ted Heath naively assumed everyone would trust. And we got the dissolution of the Northern Ireland parliament and the beginnings of the first experiment in peace processing, talks with the IRA and a meeting in London between the Northern Ireland Secretary of State and the IRA leaders.
The republican analysis is that Britain is Ireland’s problem but the British position reverses that and sees Ireland as Britain’s problem, and a very tricky problem too.
Successive governments have tried harsh measures and gentler ones to keep Irish and Northern Irish parties on board to solve it.
And if the damage was done at partition in 1921, and if that was a violation that should never have been contemplated, this has at least been superseded by the Good Friday Agreement.
Another argument might be that partition was a compromise for the sake of peace.
Even then part of Britain’s dilemma was that destroying Ireland to keep it was unthinkable, evil as Churchill’s murderous reprisals had been.
The Black and Tans disgracing their own country may have contributed to independence in the same way the paras in Derry did to the fall of Stormont.
The response in some tweets to these points will be that I am ignoring 800 years of oppression, famine and tyranny. But the problems we face now are the problems of today and tomorrow.
Trying to position Britain as the whole of the problem is just a way of ignoring the need to work on reconciliation at home.
