WHEN you express strong opinions, you find yourself with allies and detractors.
Then when you express similarly strong opinions on another matter, which you think has no bearing on the first, you find that some of your allies turn against you.
They question the sincerity of all of your opinions.
I opposed political violence in Northern Ireland. I saw no justification in killing and bombing for Irish unity or in opposition to it.
I was most critical of the Provisional IRA which was doing most of the killing and which presented itself as acting on behalf of my community.
I was a Catholic and Irish and some of the most active bombers and assassins of that movement were immediate neighbours of mine.
People would argue with my stance. You live here.
You know the discrimination Catholics faced; you know how brutal the British army has been here.
But I took the view that violent protest that cost lives was the wrong response to those problems.
I would argue now that even the leaders of the IRA campaign came round to that view themselves.
But those who liked what I said and wrote didn't all oppose the IRA campaign for the same reasons that I did.
I lost the support and friendship of some when I argued against the so-called war on terror that followed 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
I wrote articles criticising the invasion and spoke on a platform outside the City Hall in Belfast before a large audience that actually included members of the Provisional IRA.
I was warmly applauded but some of those who had seen me as an ally until then were angry.
I got an email from a very prominent London journalist expressing his disappointment in me.
He had assumed that I was a passionate opponent of terrorism and as such we should have been on the same side as him.
I didn't agree with his, or with George Bush's assessment that terrorism was some universal phenomenon, a toxic miasma creeping across the globe which could be extinguished through the ardent militarism of the ‘free world’.
I did not mind that he disagreed with me. What bothered me was the assumption that agreement in one area would morph smoothly into agreement in another.
A similar thing happened during the debates over Brexit.
I opposed Brexit and I also argued that Brexit would weigh in my considerations of whether or not Ireland should be united. This appalled some people who saw me turning into some kind of soft Sinn Féiner, reneging on my former opposition to militant republicanism.
But I had never said that I would oppose a united Ireland, only that violence was the wrong way to advance that cause and would not work anyway.
I would make my mind up on pragmatic grounds when the time to vote on it came, and Brexit provided a new pragmatic reason for it. I wasn’t betraying any cause or any friend by saying so.
My position was in no way a retrospective endorsement of the IRA campaign or an expression of support for Sinn Féin.
To be honest, the criticism of the Irish government’s objections to a hard border - which were perhaps overplayed - did rile my sense of being Irish. I travel on an Irish passport and the country which offers me diplomatic cover was being sneered at. Some people seemed to think that Ireland was not entitled to stand aside from Britain and to speak up for its own interests.
That sentiment in me has been reawakened and again I find myself in disagreement with friends, political activists and journalists with whom I was previously in accord.
I think Israel has been disproportionate in its response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
That isn't to express any sympathy with Hamas.
My sympathies are with the innocent dead, most of whom are civilians in Gaza. Their lives are being regarded as lightly expendable in an effort to crush Hamas.
I also fear that the intention of the Israeli government may be more than it declares, a determination to destroy Gaza and appropriate that territory, even reshape the politics of the Middle East.
Israel has insulted Ireland by claiming that it is antisemitic in its support for international law and the rights of the Palestinian people to a state.
I respond to that on two levels. On one level I think and hope that I am addressing the problem rationally and saying that I believe in international law, believe in the preservation and protection of an international legal system and simply reject the idea that those who defend such a basic and noble idea are doing so out of racist or sectarian motivation.
But on another level I do respond, I accept, out of the sense of affronted Irish identity, such as was in play during the arguments over Brexit too.
Some such innate conviction leads some to believe that Israel is always to be defended and absolved, regardless of the carnage.
And some are engaging in this argument, as they did in the Brexit argument too, out of a sense of outrage that Ireland is actually a sovereign state expressing a foreign policy to which its sovereignty entitles it.
