President tells it like it is, but we can’t say such things these days

“I WAS only ever wrong once,” goes the favourite joke of a friend of mine. “It happened once when I thought I was wrong, but I was actually right!”

I'm dedicating this gag to President Mary McAleese who last weekend had to apologise for her assessment of Protestant bigotry in Northern Ireland in the bad old days even though she was actually right in what she said.

In an interview to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she said that Nazis had "given their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics".

It was a real second-term comment the kind of tactless and thoughtless thing that shrewd politicians rarely say when on an election footing. But the president is not running for office any more.

The Nazis are too often invoked to illustrate evil. You even have elements on the American left who compare George W Bush with Hitler, and who think of US foreign policy in terms of the greedy expansionism of the Third Reich. Such parallels are unfair and extreme.

And overuse dulls their effect. The Nazi pathology was probably unique, nothing quite like it having happened before or since. Even when justified, these comparisons may weaken our remembrance of the horrors of the Third Reich.

That, of course, is not the reason why Ian Paisley Jr was out of the blocks so quickly last Thursday. Young Paisley thought the president's comments were "completely irrational" and "designed to insult the integrity of the Protestant community and damn an entire generation of Protestant people."

How ironic that Ian junior made the running on this. I accept that he may be too young to remember some of his father's more colourful remarks about Catholics and 'Popery' in the 1960s, although something tells me you don't have to go back that far.

Surely the Paisleys have an attic in their house. And up there among the memorabilia there must be old editions of the Protestant Telegraph. If you want to know what a community is teaching its children, it's helpful to look at their newspapers.

You get an insight into what they are saying among themselves. The Protestant Telegraph was Paisley's newspaper; its masthead proclaimed that 'The Truth Shall Set You Free'. Some of the back copies make interesting reading.

The edition of January 6, 1968, criticises the ecumenical gesture of a Methodist minister who "had the pulpits of the Methodist churches opened to Roman priests... ecumenical love is hatred of God's truth and God's people," the writer says.

The same article reports the singing of 'Ulster's great Protestant hymn' and gives the verses in full, including: "Our fathers knew thee, Rome, of old/And evil is thy fame/Thy kind embrace the galling chain/Thy kiss the blazing flame/Thy blessing fierce anathema/Thy honeyed words deceit/Thy worship base idolatry/Thy Sacrament a cheat."

Was it the Roman Catholic religion, or its people, they hated? The August 1968 editions carry an advertisement from Doc Paisley himself, urging readers to purchase 'Catholic Terror Today' by one Avro Manhattan. 'It Could Happen In Ulster,' runs the main headline.

Then, a list: 'The suppression of Civil Liberties The arrest of Protestant clergymen The closing down and burning of Protestant churches Roman Catholic padres as commanders of Protestant churches Long-term imprisonments without trial The execution of Protestant individuals and groups, AND MORE HORRORS!'

The book catalogues wartime atrocities in Croatia where Catholics were the dominant ethnic group. "When the Roman Catholics in Croatia found themselves free, they acted as true Roman Catholics," writes Paisley.

"They destroyed democracy, in which no Roman Catholic has ever believed.

Abolished freedom and crushed all non-Catholics. They did this via arrests, persecutions, forced conversions, concentration camps and executions."

THEN there is a 'news' report, entitled 'Attack on three Protestant women in Armagh' and 'Cardinal congratulates followers'.

"Three Protestant women sitting in a bus which was to take them to Londonderry were murderously attacked by Romanists, the faithful followers of Cardinal Conway.

"Two policemen who were present at the commencement of the attack took to their heels and ran away. Evidently they were RCs and did not want to see or take notice of what was happening."

There was no murder, it turns out, and it is unclear from the article what actually happened. But Cardinal Conway is accused of having "congratulated these thugs on their behaviour." The Telegraph warns that, "in the future, Protestant womenfolk must be protected from the evil intentions of this murderous Church"

Let's be fair. Neither Dr Paisley's newspaper nor his view of Catholics ever represented the mainstream of Northern Protestantism.

But the views expressed in the Protestant Telegraph, which predate the Northern troubles, found riotous expression in the decades that followed, and never more than at the Holy Cross school in the Ardoyne.

When parents equipped their children with balloons full of urine and encouraged them to whistle and jeer at Catholic children, what were they doing if not teaching them to hate Catholics?

The question is, did the Ian Paisley juniiors and the Arlene Fosters deserve the apology that they got from our president? Was there a Catholic equivalent of this religious bigotry which she should have mentioned? The late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich thought there wasn't.

In an interview with RTÉ in the 1980s, and speaking as a historian, he observed that on the Catholic side the bigotry towards unionists had tended to be political in origin, whereas on the other side it tended to be religious.

Perhaps that is what Mrs McAleese was getting at. But these days you are not allowed to say such things, even when they are true. For the sake of dispute resolution, it always takes 'two to tango,' regardless of how many people are dancing. It's yet another example of the truth we may not utter for the sake of the peace process.

Of course, there are plenty of unpleasant truths on the republican side which we are now expected to overlook. Like the reality that certain Sinn Féin celebrities are high-ups in the IRA. The continuation of paramilitarism, punishment beatings and bank robberies.

And, worst of all, the 'non-crimes' like killing Jean McConville and countless acts of terrorism against people who happened to be Protestant. We have to swallow every stomach-churning mouthful of it. The truth, we have often been told, is the first casualty in war. Seems like it's among the first casualties of peace as well.