Opinion

Patrick Murphy: What sort of Ireland might we have had if conflict had not happened?

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

sectarian: While not all the Provisional IRA’s actions were sectarian in intent, almost all were sectarian in outcome
sectarian: While not all the Provisional IRA’s actions were sectarian in intent, almost all were sectarian in outcome sectarian: While not all the Provisional IRA’s actions were sectarian in intent, almost all were sectarian in outcome

This year is the 20th anniversary of the IRA's permanent ceasefire. It is also 50 years since the founding of the civil rights movement. The coincidence of the two anniversaries raises the question of how a non-sectarian, non-violent movement gave way to the most brutally violent sectarian war this state has ever seen.

It is a subject of more than academic historical interest. The slide into war, and the nature of the subsequent peace, produced a new approach to Irish politics, partition and patriotism, which has shaped 21st century Ireland.

Whatever your view on our new society, it is clear that post-ceasefire Ireland is not quite what the IRA originally intended. It also prompts the probably futile question of what sort of Ireland we might now enjoy if the war had never happened.

In 1967 the civil rights movement represented the first attempt to reform, rather than destroy, the northern state. It argued that British citizens should have British rights, a sentiment with which no one could reasonably disagree - except Ian Paisley.

He opposed the demand for democracy in an obscene display of anti-Catholic bigotry, wrongly suggesting that Protestants did not need rights. Paisley contributed significantly to the shift from peace to war.

He had unwitting allies in the IRA. From 1965 onwards, it experienced increasing division following a United Irishman editorial arguing that social and economic progress could not wait until the establishment of a "free Ireland". Republicans could improve the welfare of the Irish people, while "freeing" them.

In the north that would mean reforming, rather than destroying the state.

Although the civil rights movement ultimately won its demands for democracy and equality, reform came slowly. That strengthened the "free Ireland" argument, particularly when loyalists burned Bombay Street in August, 1969.

By December, the Provisional IRA had been formed, pledged to the state's destruction. Many now argue that the war was inevitable. It was not - and it was certainly not inevitable that it should last for nearly 30 years.

The origins of our Great War are varied and complex. From 1922, the IRA abandoned politics and while it became good at war, it never understood when and why war should be waged.

It failed to recognise that Britain was internationally embarrassed by demands for civil rights, but London had no difficulty in claiming it was suppressing terrorism when the IRA killed three Scottish soldiers in Ligoniel in 1971.

With Paisley stirring up sectarianism, Britain could also claim that it was merely a peace keeper here. On Bloody Sunday 1972, it drove the civil rights movement off the streets to clear the way to an all-out war with the IRA.

Its main weapons would be loyalist death squads and republican informers. The IRA welcomed the invitation and in the only inevitable aspect of the war, it inevitably lost. While not all its actions were sectarian in intent, almost all were sectarian in outcome. When the IRA murdered 10 Protestant workmen at Kingsmill in 1976, Britain won the war.

Having failed to destroy the state in a 30-year war, the IRA then set about trying to reform it through peace from 1997.

In the peace settlement, Sinn Féin and the SDLP amazingly accepted the legitimacy of partition, abolished Dublin's territorial claim over the north and abandoned the concept of the Irish nation as including unionists.

All three represented a major British victory.

Just as the war was apolitical, the peace contained not a single social or economic objective, even though the 1969 world of welfare and state ownership had long since been replaced in 1997 by Thatcherism.

Sadly, neither war nor peace advanced the cause of either a "free Ireland" or produced social and economic progress.

For 30 years SF has tried to make Northern Ireland work. Now it has turned almost full circle to the concept behind the civil rights campaign, ironically to ensure that the state does not work, or at least not yet.

A Bill of Rights, scorned by the IRA in 1970 as reformist, is now a main plank in Sinn Féin's demands, but this time equality has a more sectarian overtone, rather than representing a universal right.

This sectarianism has allowed James Brokenshire to travel to the US this week to claim once again that Britain is an honest broker, keeping the political peace between two warring tribes.

It would have been nice to celebrate the civil rights anniversary, in a non-sectarian society, with a violent-free modern history. But we are stuck with our past. It is the failure to learn from that past which renders most of our anniversaries sadly meaningless.