Assertion of some rights fuels division

It is tragic that so many people in the North, from both communities, seem so ready, so determined to mark events or celebrate loyalties in ways that almost inevitably provoke another round of the danse macabre that ensures that age-old divisions — if not hatreds — are perpetuated.

Yesterday, republicans easily defined in the most corrupt sense of that high ideal, gathered in Castlederg to commemorate IRA men and women killed during the Troubles. The assembly’s objective was to honour, among others, two terrorists who died when a bomb they had intended to use to kill innocent people in a Tyrone town exploded before they could plant it.

That this event went ahead just days before the 15th anniversary of one of the very worst atrocities of the Troubles — the Omagh town centre bombing on Aug 15, 1998 — shows a deeply insensitive and blinkered view of the world that does not bode well for the prospect of communal harmony in the North.

The Tyrone Volunteers’ Day Parade was supported by Sinn Féin despite calls from Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers to call off the event. Unionists and victims’ representatives also appealed for it to be cancelled. Nevertheless, Sinn Féin venerable Martin McGuiness said people should “respect the right” of republicans to “an act of remembrance”.

Not to be outdone in asserting their cultural rights, loyalists protested against a republican parade in Belfast on Friday and left 56 police officers injured. PSNI chief constable Matt Baggott described the violence as “mindless anarchy” and “thuggery”.

The current round of street violence began when new rules around how often and when the Union flag might be flown at Belfast City Hall provoked an entirely predictable response. All of the usual tribal assertions, one more valid than the other, came to the fore and confrontation, some of it depressingly reminiscent of some of the worst days of the Troubles, was inevitable.

Those who promoted the flag law are partly to blame for the recent unrest because, like nearly all of us, they insist that the past and its wrongs still have an active place today. They cannot have been unaware of the dangers involved in what one section of their community would see as a denial of their birthright even if the other thought it was a validation of theirs.

Baffling as the North’s predilection for self-destructive tribal assertion is, we will, in the not too distant future, face a moment that will show how far along the road to a true Republic we have come.

When we mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising, will it be a military festival, celebrating the gun over the ideal? Will we step out from the past as those who rebelled against colonial rule surely intended or will we celebrate Pearse’s almost perverse blood sacrifice above all else?

We, it seems, face a quandary. Will we, like the British authorities did when they executed the Rising’s leaders, give the event an authority it did not have or will we celebrate the opportunity it offered this society? The past or the future?

Tragically the consequences of one of those choices is all too obvious in the North. Because of that failure, maybe we should use the 1916 celebrations to look forward rather than backwards, to revive that idealism and determination rather than recall the injustice and subjection that made it inevitable.