Opinion

Brian Feeney: Politicians need to stop using reconciliation as a weapon

Reconciliation: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness managed to share power together
Reconciliation: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness managed to share power together Reconciliation: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness managed to share power together

In his rambling repetitive resignation interview the wretched Barry McElduff went big on ‘reconciliation’ and avoiding being a barrier to reconciliation.

In the north the word reconciliation is just another weapon politicians use to hit each other over the head. The Christian churches here started using it around the time of the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and its ‘holier than thou’ overtones have never gone away.

It’s very much a Christian theological concept developed by men as varied as St Augustine, Luther and Calvin. They tied it in with notions of their God reconciling himself to humanity and atonement by Christ because of course they knew for certain exactly what their God was up to. Being good Christians so certain were they that they were happy to beat the daylights out of anyone who disagreed.

Since it’s fundamentally a Christian theological concept it’s got absolutely nothing to do with realpolitik and certainly not with what passes for politics here. There used to be a lot of lip service paid to churches here despite their thankfully rapidly diminishing role in society. Prelates would be wheeled out to exhort their congregations to stop killing each other, as if the conflict had something to do with transubstantiation or the virgin birth.

Tony Blair put an end to the official belief of British governments that ‘the four main churches’ here had any clout. Blair had one meeting with them in summer 1997 and sent out his press panjandrum Alistair Campbell to let it be known they were ‘useless’.

Nonetheless the churches have managed to hang the sign ‘reconciliation’ round the necks of politicians here. For religious believers reconciliation is the idea of returning to harmony after conflict. Listen folks it never happened, never happens, and isn’t going to happen here. Like other religious beliefs it’s a chimera. There was no harmony here before the conflict.

Searching for that chimera however means reconciliation can’t stand alone as you will have noticed. It requires, justice, truth, forgiveness and repentance. You will also have noticed that the DUP and Sinn Féin place the requirements in different order for different reasons. Essentially the two variations are as follows. Unionists want to prove, and for republicans to admit, that it was all republicans’ fault, that they caused all the death and destruction in the north. Ideally unionists, especially of the born again variety, would prefer if republicans admit their errors and repented. Some of them actually say that.

Republicans however want to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that unionists over fifty years frustrated by violence any opportunity to reform this place, refused to treat their neighbours as equals and were aided and abetted by successive British governments whose army behaved in a murderous, illegal, oppressive fashion.

While repentance and atonement are top for unionists, truth and justice are top for republicans. Of course republicans reject any notion of blame or demand for repentance while unionists reject any notion of truth and justice as defined by republicans.

It doesn’t take very long to spot that there isn’t going to be any reconciliation here not only because it’s a religious concept irrelevant to politics but because the constituent parts of reconciliation are different for each community. Furthermore since reconciliation means different concepts and priorities to each community it automatically produces whataboutery. You know the routine. ‘Ah, yes you demand I condemn the [fill in blank atrocity] but you won’t condemn the [fill in blank atrocity]. Unless you do that then you’re not really interested in reconciliation.’ Which is another way of saying you don’t live up to my requirements of reconciliation which are of course superior to yours.

None of this is unique to the north. Remember the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission? There’s a similar one in Chile and many other places. None of them worked in that they did not transform society. How could they? After government bedded down people just forgot about the commissions. Doesn’t mean ‘harmony returned’.

There is a way to make progress. Stop weaponising reconciliation, repentance, truth commissions, legacy investigations - all subsets of religious definitions - and get on with constructing a local administration.

There’d have been no Good Friday Agreement if any politician had mentioned reconciliation in 1998.