Daily Ireland, August 23, 2005
What can we do to end sectarianism?
by Anne Cadwallader
What can we do, personally, to add our voices against
those behind this summer’s intimidation? On behalf of all who care deeply about the plight of every
person suffering intolerable sectarian pressures, please, if there’s anything we can do, let us know
either directly or through intermediaries because there are thousands of us out here wanting to
help.
Ordinary people are left feeling helpless when something like the present
loyalist campaign of intimidation stirs, like some revolting ogre, into
graceless, nihilistic and bloody action.
Many this week are also feeling despair and anger at news from north
Belfast, north Antrim and elsewhere.
Angry that young Thomas Devlin, with his whole life in front of him, lies
dead and cold in a cemetery in Armoy and angry that Catholics are being
forced out of their homes in Ahoghill.
Those of us with the benefit of a conscience and memory will eventually look
back on the summer of 2005 with a mixture of bewilderment and shame that
such events took place. Just like we remember the Holy Cross blockade of
four years ago.
How are such events allowed to happen in a supposed civilised Western
European liberal democracy? If black, Muslim or Jewish people were involved
in Manchester, Birmingham, Dublin or Galway there would be an absolute
outcry.
If nothing else, it goes to prove that the North is unlike any other place
in the aforesaid supposed Western European democracies. As if that needed
proving.
Policemen handing out fire-blankets and advising people which window to jump
out of if they are attacked? It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious.
The Keystone Kops isn’t in it.
Then you have comments from the deputy chief constable of the Police Service
of Northern Ireland (the deputy chief constable, mind, not the assistant
chief constable of which there is a plethora).
On a flying visit to Ahoghill, the cameras on him, DCC Paul Leighton
informed us that to call the UDA campaign there “sectarian" would be overly
simplistic.
Oh no, he says, the violence is partly to blame on people “not getting on
with each other". So who, precisely, did Pat and Patsy McGaughey not “get on
with" that caused the UDA to hurl paint bombs through their living room
window?
Maybe they had had a row with the local UDA boss over whose dahlias were the
largest? Maybe it was because Pat McGaughey didn’t invite the right people
to tea and scones at the last village coffee morning.
Leaving the suggestion hanging in the air, as Mr Leighton did, leaves open
the suspicion that this totally innocent Catholic couple had somehow
contributed themselves to the violence that drove them from their dream
retirement home in Ahoghill.
Then there’s the tragic case of Thomas Devlin. His parents, naturally
enough, carrying their burden of unbearable grief, don’t want to even think
about the possibility of a sectarian motive. Who can blame them?
Difficult enough, impossible even, to get your head around your beautiful
son being stabbed five times in the back, let alone the possibility that the
perpetrator did it because he believed Thomas was Catholic.
The police, however, are paid to make cold-eyed deductions. Wasn’t it
Sherlock Holmes who said that, once you’d ruled out every impossible motive
for a crime, what you were left with, however unlikely, had to be the truth?
Robbery clearly wasn’t the motive. Neither had Thomas and his friends
challenged their attackers, ruling out retaliation for some perceived
slight. The aggressors were equipped with knives at 11.30 at night along a
stretch of road that has suffered previous sectarian attacks.
No prizes for guessing what Sherlock Holmes would have deduced, but it took
a week of “keeping an open mind" before our police finally said last
Thursday that they had “not ruled out" a sectarian motive.
Most of the dead boy’s neighbours came to the same ghastly conclusion soon
after they heard the news of his unforgivable slaying.
Why are the police so cagey about attributing motive? Is it out of deference
to the grief of the bereaved? Understandable, but they have a duty to the
community at large, to people still alive, to tell the unvarnished truth.
Do they imagine some republican grouping would immediately go out and stab a
Protestant to death? Bunkum.
The police, believe it or not, over the entire history of the Troubles, did
not keep a record of sectarian shootings, bombings, intimidation or threats.
The Equality Commission doesn’t either, although the police began to do so
in September last year.
It was left to a non-governmental organisation with minimal (and no public)
funding, the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry to comb through the newspapers and
draw up a list.
Having said that, the Central Statistics Unit of the PSNI did kindly provide
me with a list when I was writing Holy Cross, detailing the number of
sectarian incidents carried out by loyalists/republicans in north Belfast in
2001.
A very informative list it was too, as it disproved loyalist claims about
republican aggression, both before and during the school blockade.
Staying with Holy Cross for a moment, there was a conflict of views then
between the local Presbyterian clergyman, Norman Hamilton, and his
counterpart in the Church of Ireland, Stewart Heaney.
Heaney publicly condemned the loyalist protest in no uncertain terms, coming
under threat from certain elements in his parish as a result. Hamilton
disagreed violently with this line of action.
“Statements by other churchmen," he said, “only made it worse. Far better to
talk to people rationally, to try and persuade them they were going about
their cause the wrong way".
There are arguments to be made in both directions, but at some point, and
that point has been reached now, I would argue, both on the loyalist feud
and on the north Antrim intimidation, when it is time to speak out.
I can’t have been the only one gulping air at the sight of Presbyterian
ministers Jeremy Gardiner and Russell Birney and the Church of Ireland
minister, the Rev Stuart Lloyd, courageously giving an example by scrubbing
the paint-spattered steps of Our Lady’s church at Harryville.
As clergymen, that was giving a lead but we all have responsibilities as
private citizens. What can we do, personally, to add our voices against
those behind this summer’s intimidation?
So, here and now, on behalf of all who care deeply about the plight of every
person, Catholic or Protestant, suffering intolerable sectarian pressures,
please, if there’s anything we can do, let us know either directly or
through intermediaries because there are thousands of us out here wanting to
help.
Anne Cadwallader is a freelance journalist, broadcaster and author of Holy
Cross: The Untold Story.
