Terrorism and the corruption of public life
We in Ireland know that an incalculable price has to be paid by the generations to come for any ill-judged resort to violence, whether by the state or by individuals and groups of individuals within the state.
We also know in Ireland that there is a corresponding responsibility on the part of leaders to ensure that the ways of peaceful protest prosper and that the oppressed everywhere can hope to remove their sense of oppression by democratic rather than violent means.
For this to be possible we must give meaning in the conduct of our daily lives to such high-sounding words as ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt,’ ‘justice’ and ‘truth.’
If we cannot inspire our citizens with a sense of the reality of these concepts in the functioning of our democratic system, then we cannot hope for a future of peace and harmony, but merely a continuation of old feuds and venomous hatreds.
It is not enough to set democracy against terrorism in the belief that democracy is the absence of terror.
We must cherish the ways of democracy in the eradication of corruption in our public life.
There are so many examples of corruption to hand in the tribunals that now deform the public landscape that we are failing to set a proper standard for our younger generation to emulate.
I would like to know, for example, why our political leaders have only now started to inform us that Gerry Adams was a member of the IRA when we have been urged for so long to accept Sinn Fein as an integral part of the peace process.
There is no-one that we cannot choose to blame for the troubles in Ireland over many years, and many indeed have been extremely blameworthy.
But naming and blaming have got us nowhere.
No person and no country can prosper in a climate of blame. I hope that the slaughter in Madrid will remind us all of the price of failure in Ireland.
Those of us who happened to be in Dublin in 1974 will need no reminding.
Gerald Morgan,
School of English,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.
