Date: 18/08/2009
Category: Community
Northern Ireland has just remembered the start of the Troubles in August 1969. Dimly remembered figures have re-appeared on the TV screen. Other figures in their 60s and 70s, who sometimes bear some resemblance to what they were like in their 20s and 30s, have re-appeared to give their reminiscences. However, we seem more animated by the arrival of the tall ships in Belfast. Yet, the start of the collapse of Northern Irish society into chaos can be dated to August 1969 – the age of the gun began. In the words of Jackie McDonald, the UDA commander in South Belfast, ‘everything became sinister – you lost the sunny days’. We lost our innocence, symbolised by some of the Shankill Road Methodist Sunday School making petrol bombs at the back of the church.
We are a more equal society today. Many people gained a new dignity – the civil rights activist Eamonn McCann says, ‘Many people in the Bogside felt empowered, they weren’t being led or dictated to or talked down to. For so long they had felt marginalised…’ There is now power-sharing. But we are a more segregated society and there is all the ‘weight’ of what happened, the deaths, the destruction, ‘a generation blasted into bitterness’ in the words of Eric Gallagher.
Could it have been different? Those who used violence on both sides regret the innocent deaths but they felt they had their backs to the wall: they had to do what they did. There are always ‘reasons’ for using violence. Did injustice, a dismal history of action and reaction, poisoned relationships, political failure, intransigence and neglect, lack of judgement on all sides, lead inevitably to the events of August 1969?
Whatever the answer to the question we live with the consequences. In the words of one of the Provisional IRA leaders, Billy McKee, ‘The easiest thing is to start a war – the hardest thing is to stop it’. It has taken nearly 40 years for the guns (mostly) to have gone away. We must now use the possibilities given us to create a shared future, and determine never to go back to the age of the gun.
Additional Information:
Author: David Stevens
Leader of the Corrymeela Community