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Editorial:
Trust enough? From
the director: Icons of Culture and Political Identity: A Decade
of Opportunity Comment:
Shaking hands with soldiers At
the end of the day: Trust Remember
1916 Shattered
pieces - a journey in recovering trust Interview
with Rev John Dunlop & Danny Morrison: Truth & Trust Faith
matters lyo
nta kindi dufite uretse UKWIZERA A
Reader's Response to Lion&Lamb #40 Bible
Study: Trust Review:
Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries
of Belonging and Belief Review:
1916: Lest We Forget Difficult
Conversations |
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DWP: How do we build a new society in Northern Ireland where trust is pretty well absent from the public discourse? Is trust a necessary component for peace? JD: It's not
easy to build a society where there is almost no trust at all. The
30 years of violence have destroyed whatever elements of trust were
there beforehand. DM: Is trust
a prerequisite for political agreement? No, I think a political
agreement would help build trust. I would contest
that there was a great degree of trust there prior to the outbreak
of the conflict. I come from the nationalist community and I ended
up supporting an armed struggle. I find it extremely frustrating
trying to explain to people who did not share that upbringing, that
culture - the degree of alienation and humiliation that was there. There is an
assumption that for 50 years of what I would consider Unionist misrule
things were great, because people didn't do anything about their
condition. I'm not using that to explain or justify everything that
subsequently happened - but there was very little trust there. Because of
the sectarian divide, people would not have confided in a workmate
his or her true views about a particular situation and obviously
there was no political trust there. As regards
the future, I think that the truth is important. If we can tell
each other the truth about what we're out to get, that will help.
For [the Provos] armed struggle has stopped, and they don't view
the Belfast Agreement as being permanent - they are open about this.
For those who thought that the Belfast Agreement would end everything,
that it was 'a settlement', then that must destabilise the unionist
community to an extent. That's the point of view [Republicans] start
working from, so we're going to have massive problems in the times
ahead. I believe it's very important to talk to people because it's only when you talk to someone else that you start to view the conflict from their perspective. Often you have this glib and dismissive view of their perspective but talking to them you can build trust, from the bottom up. DWP: So one of you is saying trust was broken by the 30 years of violence the other is saying this community has never been able to trust [the other]. DM: That's what I'm saying, that's the problem. DWP: So we're not so much rebuilding, as trying to find a basis for building trust in the first place, is that it? JD: Well, I
think that Danny is right - prior to the most recent conflict starting,
the degree of trust was limited because the two communities were
living separate lives and were not interacting or listening to one
another. The 60s were
the most hopeful decade in my life, because things were starting
to move in the right direction. For the first time, as a Presbyterian,
I was meeting Catholics, Catholic bishops, getting engaged in serious
discussions. Frankly, Presbyterians didn't trust the Catholic Church.
They thought there was a great international conspiracy to eliminate
Protestantism and to remove the rights of Protestants because error
had no rights. With the Second Vatican Council in the sixties, discussions
got going and relationships were being established. As a result
people began to shift their understanding of one another and trust
was beginning to develop. The Northern, largely Protestant, unionist community looked at the South and didn't feel that their rights would ever be accommodated inside a united Ireland. They didn't trust the Irish majority to do anything other than pursue an Irish Catholic nationalist agenda. If people had trusted one another, Ireland would never have been partitioned. DM: Partition
certainly reinforced the whole Catholic ethos of the 26-county State,
which, politically and ideologically, republicans would have been
opposed to. Prior to 1969,
small things were happening. A number of us - Catholics from the
Falls and Protestants from the Shankill and Sandy Row - were into
pirate radio and we would go into each other's houses, swap valves
and things like that, but we never spoke about politics or religion.
The tragedy is that when the barricades went up in August '69 I
gave my transmitter to the Republicans - it became Radio Free Belfast
- and a friend of mine in the unionist community, I could hear his
transmitter being used as Radio Shankill. I never saw him again
after that. Ironically - but maybe I'm wrong - Protestants/unionists don't seem to take succour from the degree of secularism there is in the 26 counties now and within the nationalist community in the North. JD: A secular society is a catch-22 as far as the churches are concerned. In a sense any minority church has more freedom in a secular society than it may have in a society which is dominated by one faith community. A secular Republic of Ireland may well have more space for Protestants than a homogenous Catholic society. At the same time, secularism has inherent dangers, where it erodes faith of both Catholics and Protestants. So on the one hand, you welcome the freedom, on the other, you realise there are dangers because secular society can be hostile to faith perspectives. DM: That's you fighting your corner there. I would prefer a secular society. The older I get, the more agnostic I think I've become and my doubts about everything, theologically, have actually increased. I can see that if it threatens to eclipse, or reduce the popularity of a range of churches, then a cleric would be opposed to that. But from a political perspective, I think that it is beneficial for our society to be more secular. JD: You said that at least people talk, tell the truth? Republicans tell you what their endgame is, and it's not the Good Friday Agreement - it's part of a process. Fergus Finlay, a former adviser to Dick Spring and quite instrumental in the early parts of the process, wrote an open letter to Gerry Adams some months ago, saying that Gerry Adams had abandoned the peace process in the pursuit of a power process. The real problem, as far as I'm concerned, is the Republicans' relentless pursuit of a united Ireland. Therefore any interim accommodation has no genuine value to it. This is why I think there is a degree of mistrust, which is unhelpful. Because you're never too sure whether or not this is just transitional. DM: Slippery slope, you're buying into a slippery slope. JD: Or a lack
of integrity in the relationship. 'Brits Out' was a wrong analysis,
because that implied the problem lay in London with the British
Government, whereas the problem for Republicans actually lay with
me and the community of which I am part. It was necessary for these
two communities to accommodate one another and reach some kind of
compromise and you were never going to get anywhere until that was
thought to be fundamentally important. I thought the Good Friday Agreement could establish that. But if you are using the Good Friday Agreement as an interim element in a power struggle, ultimately to destroy things, then it is not going to have solidity… DM: First of
all, I think you need to understand something of the republican
psyche. It was a big shift from civil rights to armed struggle,
which was not supported by the majority of the nationalist community,
though it was supported by significant sections. To wage an
armed struggle one has to adopt very fundamentalist demands. Therefore
the IRA was totally fundamentalist: the Brits had to declare the
right of the Irish people to national I was in jail
in the 1990s and [from that time on] I took nothing more to do with
the leadership of the movement - as far as I was concerned, I was
an ordinary bloke in jail. But when the first ceasefire was announced
at Christmas 1990, instinctively and intuitively I knew some form
of contact was being made. But I was also of the opinion that there
was a military stalemate. Despite being heavily re-armed in the
late 1980s and being well financed, there was a big moral dilemma:
the IRA could fight on for another 20 years without necessarily
affecting the negotiating muscle of the nationalist community or
itself. I think that then triggered a whole process of looking at
things afresh. The reality
is Sinn Féin supported the amendment of Articles 2 &
3 in the Constitution, Sinn Féin held a special conference
and decided to take its seats in the 'hated Stormont Assembly',
the IRA allowed its dumps to be inspected and then put all of its
weapons beyond use. Now, maybe
the DUP and a certain percentage of the unionist community don't
believe that Republicans have compromised; it's certainly believed
by the IRA people on the ground, who had to swallow an awful lot
to allow that to happen. So, Unionist's see "Oh, the Belfast
Agreement. You are relentlessly pursuing a United Ireland",
because that is perfectly understandable in the context of the fundamentalist
culture and background of the armed struggle. Republicans clearly
want to use the cross-border and all-Ireland elements of the Belfast
Agreement to kill the unionist community with kindness. They want
to show that socially, economically - maybe not politically - a
united Ireland or a federal Ireland, or whatever configuration,
actually makes sense! I've spoken
to unionists who've told me, and I accept this, that as a result
of the armed struggle and the alienation which it produced, they
ceased calling themselves Irish. What I am saying
is that if Unionists know that this is the Republican strategy -
it is quite transparent - then I think they can decide to engage
with self-confidence. The major irony is that unionists are now saying they don't have civil rights and that nationalists have everything - which they haven't. But today there is a palpable confidence within the nationalist community. JD: That's right. DM: I would put that down to many factors, not least the emergence of Sinn Féin as the chief spokespersons for the nationalist community. JD: Can I ask you to what degree the process since the Good Friday Agreement was signed up to? What happened when you reached this stalemate, in terms of the violence? Neither the IRA nor the security forces were going to win, so you had to find some other way through it, and that is a long and complicated process… DM: But not everybody in the Republican movement necessarily subscribed to it. JD: Right,
so you're going to have to work your way out of that. You eventually
get Stormont fixed up… In all the negotiations that followed
to what degree do you think that Sinn Féin played a very
long game with the British Government? Some people in my community
believe that that was often the case. Trimble was being consistently weakened in that process, particularly over the decommissioning issue, because of difficulties within the Unionist Party. Republicans said to me, "It's not our business to look after Trimble, Trimble has to look after himself." In the end David Trimble was destroyed by the DUP. Now, was that a part of the Republican strategy, to get rid of Trimble, or did they not care one way or another? DM: Well, I
have to admit that, before I had matured in the whole peace process,
I would have seen an advantage in the IRA calling off its campaign
in order to expose Unionists, or Unionist ideology, and also perhaps
to divide Unionists. I would have seen that as sorting out the fundamentalists
from the potential pragmatists. Having said that, by 1997/98, it
certainly was no longer my thinking. The IRA people I was in jail
with were prepared to trust the judgment of Adams and McGuinness,
but for Republicans the peace process took a major dig in the solar
plexus just after the signing of the Belfast Agreement. Ultimately, the weapons issue had to be dealt with. I felt it could be dealt with over a period of time. The pressure on the IRA created a suspicion that the Unionists were out to split the IRA, and to perhaps undermine Adams and McGuinness. DWP: So each side has played to the mutual mistrust of the other. DM: Occasionally, but that's human nature. I do believe that Adams has tried to work the thing and has taken huge risks. DWP: Why do you think, John, the unionist community is so reluctant to plough ahead with the political and to get everything up and running? What are the issues of trust now? JD: The way
decommissioning was strung along forever was one of the issues which
ultimately destroyed Trimble. But there were a lot of difficulties
and of everybody he probably had the most difficult hand to play
in the whole deal. I think inside
the unionist/Protestant/Presbyterian community, there is a high
degree of mistrust about whether or not criminality has really been
dealt with seriously and put to the one side. I hoped that
the Good Friday Agreement would have been built on step by step-by-step
and it would have solidified itself. It causes me enormous concern
now that the two parts of this society are separating. The population
is now more divided than ever. That absence of trust, the breakdown
of relationships between the two parts of this community plays out
politically as well. Is there one particular thing that could be
fixed? I'm not sure that there is. You talked
about one-to-one dialogue. I think the public dialogue that takes
place in the public space is very important because other people
can listen to it and begin to see that there's some meeting of minds,
some commonality of purpose and that some compromises are being
reached here. The other thing is, really, Sinn Féin. They are self-confident, extremely powerful and have international coalitions. At the end of the day, people suspect that they are not out to have an accommodation with Unionism, but to destroy it. Having failed to do so through armed struggle, they're now determined to destroy it by another method. And that distrust is there. DM: This is very apocalyptic. JD: I think that is where the core problem lies. DM: I understand
that. But it serves no purpose for us, whatever way the country
is configured in the future, to have a million people totally alienated
from the system. It makes absolutely no sense and represents no
victory whatsoever. Romantically,
I would have wanted a united Ireland for ultranationalist reasons.
But it actually makes social and economic sense to move towards
some sort of economic harmonisation, for the good of everyone. It
doesn't mean that people can't say they're Irish, or they're British.
I think we have to have mutual respect in that regard. When I hear
you talking about criminalisation, I say to myself, "Does John
know what he's talking about?" I live in West Belfast where
five out of the six councillors are Sinn Féin councillors.
If the degree of criminality which I read about in the tabloids
existed, why would people vote for Sinn Féin? Maybe people
who were in the Republican movement, ex-prisoners or whatever, are
doing their own thing, but to say that there's massive criminality
is to defraud yourself of understanding exactly what is going on.
It appears that this is being used now as yet another hurdle: "Sinn
Féin must… Instead of using sackcloth and ashes, you
must prove yourselves, go through a period of quarantine, we must
have so many reports, you must be given a clean bill of health before
we will consider getting into government with you." I believe devolved
government was a good experience for both communities. I think it
would be a powerhouse for building trust: people meeting each other,
going in and out of each other's offices, sitting on committees,
for Republicans to go down to Ballywalter, or all those places to
see what problems are there, and to try to sort it out. The Unionists should be making a brilliant argument to me why I should be British and why I should want to remain in the United Kingdom, but they don't do it! JD: I think that there's everything to be gained by building the North/South relationships. But I think that 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been more difficult. Before all the European Union money the Republic of Ireland wasn't very strong economically. Large numbers of people were emigrating. DM: They'd nothing to offer. JD: But the
Celtic Tiger has transformed all of that. The main Unionist/Protestant
objections to a united Ireland back in 1910-20 were a) the power
of Catholicism and b) the economic question. Both of these have
changed - therefore there's everything to be gained by building
relationships with one another. I find that
building relationships with people from your community is an enriching,
rather than a diminishing, experience. I believe there is an obligation
on the part of people from my community, from Presbyterians, to
build relationships with the Catholic community, to build relationships
with nationalists and republicans. It is an obligation which is
laid upon us in the Gospel, but even at the level of sheer self-interest
it is necessary to do it. The increasing separation of these communities
is not in our interest at all, because it weakens the community
that I am part of. Sheer self-interest would require us to build
relationships and build trust, and that is an absolute priority
that I try to exercise in my own life. I think that the experience of shared responsibility in the Executive was a good experience, and people started to be able to do things together and be mutually enriched by that. But things have slipped back. (DM agrees) Can that now be recovered, to move it forward again? I hope it can because I don't want to see this kind of unsatisfactory stalemate continue. It is not in anybody's interest, and not, particularly, in the interests of my community. DWP: But religious and political leaders in Unionism and the Protestant community are being extremely cautious in making any effort to build trust. Is there something more going on than just analysing the politics and economics? Is there something within Protestant Unionism at the moment that is blocking any capacity to do anything creative about reaching out? What are those issues? Why did Ken Newell - who was well known for his dialogue with Republicans - end up on a political TV programme, basically telling Alex Maskey off? JD: I think Ken Newell felt massively betrayed by the Northern Bank [robbery]. He is somebody who, from within the Protestant community, had taken an enormous number of risks in his own life. Ken had stepped out of line, took a position which was a minority position in the church, and got a lot of stick for it. He felt he'd been made to look a fool by what happened in the Northern Bank. I think he was simply calling it as he saw it at that time: this is just crazy. In that sense, he spoke for a lot of us who felt, "What's the point of going down that road and then the Northern Bank gets robbed?" You just felt betrayed. DWP: Part of the problem of hearing any comment from Republicans on that is that Gerry Adams keeps saying he's not a member of the IRA and never has been, and then in the next sentence says, "Trust me, we did not do the Northern Bank". DM: When I
first heard about it I thought that the IRA did it, then when I
heard Martin McGuinness' and Gerry Adams' rebuttals, I pulled back
from that thought. The Northern Bank and other allegations of IRA
activity can either mean that the IRA are totally deceitful or half-hearted,
or how do you explain it - £26 million is a huge slippage!
I can understand how that would cause massive problems. It would
not be the optimum way of going about building trust and building
the political process. On the other hand, against the culture that Republicans came through… you could speculate and say, would the IRA have done it if, two weeks beforehand, the DUP had entered into an agreement with Sinn Féin? I think some media analysis suggested that it was Republicans, that the IRA leadership was sending a shot across the bows "You're messing us about, we have gone to all these lengths, we've brought our own ranks…we did everything that we committed ourselves to, and we still find ourselves in the same position". JD: So does that mean that the Northern Bank robbery was a kind of local Canary Wharf - just telling people to "wise up and don't muck us around"? DM: I don't know. I honestly don't know. DWP: It seems to me that the pent-up grief and anger about the armed struggle is contributing to the impasse at the moment. DM: I think
once we start talking about pent-up anger and emotion, about the
conflict, that it's a two-way street. The IRA did Donegall Street,
the IRA killed the people at Enniskillen, the IRA planted the bombs
in Birmingham… We don't know
the degree of State involvement in running and organising loyalist
paramilitary organisations and there seems little desire or interest
on the part of the unionist community in finding out whether that
was the case. That raises all sorts of questions about who was pulling
the strings. There were lots of things happened on the IRA side
in the past 30 years which the IRA wondered at. But that's a whole
other discussion…. I was invited to speak at a mixed conference down in Fermanagh, outside Tempo, and a journalist from the Impartial Reporter got up and said, "Have you any idea of the betrayal our community felt when 30,000 people voted for Bobby Sands?" And I said, "Have you any idea how we felt, when a quarter of a million people voted for Ian Paisley?" And he took the point... JD: Well, you see, did he take the point? DM: Well, I think he took the point. Maybe he didn't take the point… JD: Maybe he thought the analogy was ridiculous. DM: Well, I don't. JD: No, you
don't, but this is where you come back to the necessity of dialogue…that
you listen to whatever this man has to say and you actually get
inside the heart and the mind that lies behind that story, so that
his story is actually understood. It is very important that happens. Whenever that degree of empathy and understanding happens, you begin to rebuild trust again, because it's built on a sympathetic understanding of two stories which have intersected with one another with a high degree of violence. DM: When I
was a kid growing up on the Falls Road, I was terrified of Ian Paisley.
He had an incredibly terrifying effect on the nationalist community.
Maybe people voted for Bobby Sands to put it up to unionists, maybe
they thought they would save his life. I do believe it's a legitimate analogy. The point is I don't think that reporter had ever thought about it like that before. You may think that comparison unjustified. But we take from a vote for Paisley the same feelings that unionists would take from a vote for Bobby Sands. That is the reality inside us, that's still how appalling it was. DWP: What do you need the other community to do to re-establish trust, to get the political process back up and running? What do you think your community needs to do, for the other community, to re-establish that trust? DM: I think
there are unresolved politics within the unionist community. While
Republicans and Nationalists have no problems going into Executive
government with their opposites, the DUP has a major problem. Also
I cannot see Ian Paisley having [a representative of] 'Sinn Féin/IRA'
as his Deputy First Minister. That's such a contradiction of his
whole political life and it's so difficult for him to explain that
to himself and to his supporters. Republicans shifted ground over
a period of time, which made it possible. I don't think that the
DUP can make that change without a split. The Republicans
and Nationalists have it fairly well worked out. If no pragmatic
politics come out of the unionist community, then they're going
to move on to the next option, which is to try to get the British
government to work the all-Ireland, cross-border aspects of the
Agreement, which don't require an Executive. Even though it risks
the further alienation John was talking about. Now, that is dangerous
but Republicans are not going to sit on their hands, are they? It's not in my community's interests to see the two communities increasingly polarised and divided. Of course, I would love to see Ireland united but I can wait for that. What I won't have is being vanquished and being oppressed. But I'm not currently, so, therefore, that is fine with me. If that were to change then there would be a temptation to review things. But I think we're in a very fortunate situation, in that, by and large, the majority of people who were involved in the conflict don't want to go back and that is a brilliant beginning. JD: I think
the republican community needs to be careful, that it hasn't, in
fact, substituted a relentless search for power and destroyed the
peace process in the meantime, or put it at enormous risk. I would
like to know that the Republican movement is serious about the peace
process, and not just about a power process. I get on quite
well talking to Republicans on a one-to-one basis, but there's a
kind of mismatch sometimes, I find, between that and the centralised
organisation. I believe that
my community has a moral, political and historical obligation to
make peace with our neighbours, in Northern Ireland and in the rest
of Ireland. There's a moral imperative and I think we need to do
it. Retreating into ghettos, whether they're middleclass or working-class
ghettos, or ghettos controlled by loyalist paramilitaries, is not
the way forward. That drift away from engagement into isolation
is not in our interest. George Mitchell, interviewed after the Good Friday Agreement, said that the Agreement was designed to take into account the absence of trust. That's why it's as complex as it is - it accommodates mistrust. DWP: It's rather ironic, therefore, that lack of trust is why the politicians won't make it work, when the Agreement was designed to accommodate mistrust. That was its genius. Rev Dr John
Dunlop and Danny Morrison were in conversation with David
Porter on 31st May 2006. |
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