Opinion

Brian Feeney: Higgins is wise not to take part in commemoration of partition

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

President Michael D Higgins. Picture Mal McCann.
President Michael D Higgins. Picture Mal McCann. President Michael D Higgins. Picture Mal McCann.

We’re now told that the ‘non-political’ church service that President Higgins had the wit, wisdom and political nous to decline, has a programme of events following on which includes a state reception at Hillsborough Castle, and historic buildings illuminated across the UK to celebrate partition and the violent birth of its misbegotten spawn, the north.

They’d hardly drag a 95-year old woman over to Armagh for just an hour, would they? May as well maximise her presence.

Doesn’t seem very neutral does it? Sounds like a very formal British occasion beginning in a cathedral of the Anglican religion forced on Ireland to commemorate the forced partition of Ireland. Much semantic claptrap about the events not being a commemoration when very obviously they are and are so intended as the queen’s presence reinforces. ‘Mark’, the preferred word of the clerics responsible, is just a weasel word to try to con the credulous into believing there are no political connotations. There are always political connotations about commemorations.

Higgins couldn’t attend a commemoration, mark, celebration, what have you, of the partition of his own country with all its associated horrors at the time and subsequently. However, he has contributed his own reflection on the events in a way not acknowledged by the media in the north, in most cases not even mentioned.

The president set up and hosted Machnamh 100, an online series. Machnamh is Irish for reflection, but with the deeper connotations of contemplation and meditation. Machnamh reflected on the War of Independence, the Civil War and yes, partition. It’s still continuing. Higgins makes speeches on each matter himself analysing the meaning and consequences. Distinguished academics, philosophers and literary figures contribute also. One seminar of particular interest in the present context was: “Of Centenaries and the Hospitality Necessary in Reflecting on Memory, History and Forgiveness.”

As far as BBC here is concerned it may all be in Swahili on the planet Uranus.

The second Machnamh seminar included consideration of European empires following the First World War, the British Empire in particular and imperial attitudes and responses to events in Ireland. It also included reflections on examples of resistance to empire in Ireland and resistance to nationalism, an overview of the international context of the events in 1920s Ireland, including the fall of empires and the particular status/power of the British Empire. That international context included Britain’s bloody role in suppressing Indian demands for independence as in the Amritsar massacre. The indisputable fact is that unionists, and those commemorating events a century ago with them, are incapable of examining what occurred in the context of imperialism. They still see themselves as participants in Britain’s current failed imperialist activity.

The partition of Ireland and forcible imposition of the northern sub-polity was the first example last century of Britain exercising its colonial power to carve up a country, arming its supporters then dumping them. Unionists desperately want Irish people to collude in validating what happened. They crave legitimacy for this colonial rump, a legitimacy which can only be given by Irish people and which therefore will never be forthcoming.

Look at what was being asked of President Higgins from a wider perspective. In all seriousness can you imagine the president of Pakistan, Dr Arif Alvi, joining the president of India, Ram Nath Kovind, to commemorate the partition of Kashmir in 1947? In case you don’t know, Pakistan regards it as a profound injustice to have partitioned majority Muslim Kashmir and allocated any of it to India. For the last seventy-odd years there have been repeated rebellions and guerrilla campaigns against Indian authority. Familiar?

You could multiply examples of British colonial recklessness and irresponsible imperialism, or for that matter French or Spanish, causing a legacy of death and destruction down generations.

Don’t try to tell anyone it’s anything to be celebrated, commemorated or marked with anything but an act of contrition by Britain.