Why salute one generation of rebels and condemn another?

THE noted critic of militant republicanism, Tom Carew, would have us believe that the almost 30 years of strife in the North was just one very long crime wave — “organised serial mass murder”, he calls it (Irish Examiner letters, May 11).

He denounces the people on one side of this tragic conflict as terrorists, murderers and revolutionary gangsters, while hailing the North’s security forces as heroic upholders of law and order.

If only it were that simple. The truth is that, for many, one side dominated, bullied and oppressed the other, trampling all over the rights of the nationalist population.

What happened in 1969 was that all those decades of suffering in silence erupted into civil strife and breathed life back into the IRA.

Side by side with the legitimate grievance against unionist bigotry and sectarianism went a strong sense among a large section of the nationalist community of having been cheated of nationhood.

They had been abandoned, as they saw it, to continued British rule and unionist domination after the Government of Ireland Act and the Treaty. While most of Ireland was incorporated into the new Free State, these people, who regarded themselves as Irish citizens equally deserving of freedom and independence, were condemned by a shady political deal to continue living under a foreign flag.

Having seen that we in this part of Ireland achieved our independence by bloody force, many downtrodden people up North concluded that a similar approach might win them their independence from Britain.

Yet, while celebrating our own independence and deifying our patriot dead such as Pearse and Connolly, almost the entire political establishment down here has roundly and routinely attacked the deployment of equally violent tactics by more recent generations of revolutionaries.

We applaud the heroism of Pearse, a brave man who died for Ireland but had no electoral mandate for his actions, while condemning Bobby Sands, who also died for Ireland but not before getting elected MP for Fermanagh/ South Tyrone, having secured an overwhelming endorsement from the voters of that constituency.

We condemn revolutionaries of the 1970s and ‘80s who staged attacks on those they deemed to constitute their enemies. But we celebrate, in song and ballad, ambushes of the 1920s in which British soldiers, police and Tans were cut down on remote country roads and laneways around Ireland.

I am not an advocate of violence in any shape or form, but I believe we cannot fairly attack the behaviour of people on the nationalist side of the conflict that has now ended, and while engaging in glib whitewashing of the role of the British forces and police over the same turbulent period.

Mr Carew speaks of “mass murder”. The shooting dead of unarmed civilians in Derry in 1972 could be described as such, as could the killing or wounding of so many people by pro-British paramilitaries who received tip-offs and, in some cases, even weapons from the security forces.

With the peace process now enshrined as part of our path to a New Ireland, I suggest that revisionists like Mr Carew accept that the days of ‘Croppie lie down’ are over for the nationalist people of the North.

They may not have their independence yet — the independence we denied them in 1922 — but the bullies who kept them in shackles and who ruled by fear and terror for so long have now become a spent force.

We are moving towards a new dawn, and perhaps some day the true meaning of the tricolour will become a reality: Orange on one side, Green on the other, and white symbolising the peace that must reign between the two.

John Fitzgerald

Lr Coyne Street

Callan

Co Kilkenny