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Les Reid

 

In 1998, on Good Friday, the governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland signed an agreement which initiated a peace process. The process has had its share of hiccups but there has been some clear advance towards peace. Les Reid, Secretary of the Belfast Humanist Group, summarises a complex situation.

 

The great sectarian struggle between Protestants and Catholics, which has been going on for many generations, does not really concern Humanists, because we do not ally ourselves with either camp, but we can get caught up in the violence all the same. We are a tiny minority, trying to talk rationally when Godzilla and King Kong are fighting to the death beside us. You would hope that more people would join the Humanists in that situation, to speak up for rational, non-sectarian views, but that has not happened so far.

 

However, we do have today a better chance of peace than we have had for generations. At long last, politicians, both British and Irish, both Unionist and Nationalist, and both Protestant and Catholic, have sat down at the negotiating table and have talked about the best way forward for our troubled country. The politics of confrontation and violence have been replaced with the politics of discussion and negotiation.

 

Most Humanists here support the Agreement, but it could all fall apart yet. The extreme unionists, led by Ian Paisley, a fundamentalist Protestant cleric, are opposed to the Agreement and would like it to fail. They represent between 20 and 25% of the people. They are opposed to close relations with Southern Ireland, partly because they suspect the South is trying to take over, but also because the South is devoutly Catholic.

 

The main problem is terrorist guns. The Agreement makes many references to ‘decommissioning’, which means the dismantling of all terrorist weapons. All the other provisions of the Agreement are now in place: hundreds of prisoners have been released from gaol, the N. Ireland Assembly has been elected, Government responsibilities have been shared out, the North-South Council has met but still no arms have been destroyed. The Protestant terrorists made a small gesture in 1998, destroying about twenty rifles, but the Catholic terrorists (the IRA) did not reciprocate and nothing else has happened as regards arms. Of course, there is a ceasefire at present and very few people have been killed during the last two years. Some people think that is enough a ceasefire is as good as decommissioning, they say. But the Agreement does promise decommissioning and the Protestant/Unionist side are insisting on it. If there is still no decommissioning in 2002 then all the Protestant/Unionist side, the extremists and the moderates, will abandon the Assembly and the Agreement will be at an end.

 

Ireland’s Troubled History

The problems in Northern Ireland have deep roots. For example, England and Ireland were at war in the 1500s and there were great massacres of both Protestants by Catholics and Catholics by Protestants in the 1600s. But such battles were being fought all over Europe at that time we call them the Wars of Religion, and they involved Holland, France, Italy, Spain and England. The tragedy for N. Ireland is that the problem was never resolved here as it was elsewhere in Europe. We are a museum of ancient conflict.

 

Anyway, when Ireland got its independence from Britain in 1922, the Protestants in the North said that they did not want to be part of the new Ireland. They wanted to stay with Britain because they said the new Ireland would be Catholic and their rights would not be respected: ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’. The result was Civil War in Ireland between those who insisted on independence for the whole island (the Die-Hards) and those who accepted partition (the Staters). Eventually the Staters won and the North was allowed to stay British while the rest of the island became the Republic of Ireland.

 

That arrangement could have worked if people had been more tolerant. But they were not. The South became officially Catholic and the North became officially Protestant. In the South, Catholic rulings on divorce, education, contraception, censorship, etc., became law, regardless of the Protestant minority. And in the North, politics was dominated by the Orange Order, a Protestant organisation which commemorates ancient victories over Catholics, eg. the Battle of the Boyne, 1690, which they celebrate every July. (Those facts show you how religion is at the core of the problem what separates North and South is the difference of religion, and the main political parties in the North are identified accordingly.)

 

If the people had been more tolerant and had accepted that their neighbours followed a slightly different version of Christianity, then the Troubles need never have happened. If they had been friendly, rather than arrogant, then the border might have withered away in time and North and South might have been reconciled. But, instead, the two countries were in a state of tension. Instead of relaxation and reconciliation, there was tension and hatred. Some extremists who never accepted partition, some Die-Hards, kept murdering Northern policemen on the border. Catholics who lived in the North were treated as unreliable and suspicious characters. Finally the tension exploded in 1969 and the hatred turned to violence, claiming hundreds of lives. By the time the Agreement was signed in 1998, nearly 4,000 people had been killed and many times that number seriously injured. That is not a huge number compared to the deaths in Rwanda, for example, but the total population of

 

Northern Ireland is only one and a half million and nearly all those killings were deliberate, calculated murders. In short, this is a pretty sick society.

 

The Agreement is a well thought out compromise. It offers an escape from the endless cycle of accusation and counter-accusation. All the parties involved stand to gain something and they all have to yield something. For example, the Nationalists/Catholics gain power-sharing arrangements and cross-border institutions. The Unionists/Protestants gain devolved government and a constitutional guarantee (ie. the border stays as long as the majority in the North wish it). Both sides gain political power in the Assembly and clear procedures for regular referenda on the border. On the debit side, the Nationalists have to accept that the unification of North and South has been postponed, while the Unionists have to accept that the South has a role in Northern Ireland politics.

 

Integrated Schooling

But the part of the Agreement which the Humanists welcome most has received least attention. It says that integrated education should be encouraged. At present, the churches have too much say. There is apartheid in the schools, with Catholic schools and Protestant schools segregated from the children's earliest years. To its credit, the State tried to set up a fully integrated system back in 1922 when the country was created, but the churches would not accept that dilution of their power. They insisted on segregated schools.

 

Humanists think that our political problems might have been very different if Catholic and Protestant children had gone to school together. Even today, there is a lot of resistance to integration, especially from the clerics themselves. Public opinion surveys tend to show that the people are in favour of integrated schools, but obviously the clerics are frightened that they will lose a steady supply of church members, so they are fighting integration. Some Catholic clerics have described integration as another attack on the minority!

 

Many liberal Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, are campaigning for integrated schools, and the Humanists are doing so too. But the segregated system is well established and reorganisation would require a major upheaval. We have been campaigning to integrate the staffs of the schools first and so remove the schools' religious identities. But even that gradual approach seems to scare people. They seem to want integration but they do not want to change the way things are done. And very few of the politicians in the new Assembly are strongly committed to integration, since they are products of the old religio-political divisions themselves. So the Humanists and the liberal Christians will have to keep up the struggle. Let us be optimistic the Berlin Wall came down, apartheid in S. Africa was ended, segregation in the USA was banned sometimes there is progress!

 

Les Reid is Secretary of the Belfast Humanist Group

 

Website: www.reids24.freeserve.co.uk