Regan: Ireland could set example for peace

Column photo

By Kayla Regan

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Yesterday, Irish Catholic radicals orchestrated the most violent attacks across Northern Ireland in the past five years during the annual Orange parade.

Approximately 23 police officers were injured, numerous vehicles were hijacked, burned and pushed towards officers, and shots were fired at police. Rioters, approximately 200 of them youths, threw gas bombs, bricks, bottles and other missiles at the police. In turn, the police fired plastic bullets and a water cannon to disperse the crowd.

The Real Irish Republican Army, a splinter guerrilla group of the IRA, is believed to be responsible for yesterday’s attacks, but the group claimed to be uninvolved.

I first heard about the RIRA in Derry, or Londonderry, or Freederry. Just a few years ago, the name you called the city depended on your political or religious views (Londonderry for Protestant British loyalists, and Derry or Freederry for Irish Catholic nationalists). Although it’s now commonly referred to as Derry, my coworkers got into an argument just the other day over whether I should say something was from Londonderry or Derry.

The city, made famous by U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Where the Streets Have No Name,” was one of the most violent cities in Ireland from the late 1960s until 1998, a time known as “The Troubles.”

Although the city is on its way to becoming a normal mid-size tourist spot, the statues of politicians with their heads blasted off and the IRA, F*ck IRA, or RIRA graffiti present on virtually every building make it impossible to forget what happened there. The strongest reminders of the troubles though, are murals painted on the walls of Freederry buildings depicting its Civil Rights movement and Bloody Sunday.

The marches of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association borrowed the language and peaceful civil disobedience strategies of Martin Luther King. The NICRA sought an end to a long list of institutionalized discrimination against Catholics that I don’t have the space to go into and you can look up if you’re interested. But from the beginning, the marches were met by violence from Protestants and the British police did little to stop it. Then, on January 30, 1972, now referred to as Bloody Sunday, the First Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment shot 27 NICRA marchers in Derry. The event killed 14 people, seven of them teenagers. Witnesses, including bystanders and journalists, claimed that everyone shot was unarmed and that five were shot in the back.

Recruitment numbers for the Provisional Irish Army, a group that would be responsible for much of the violence in “The Troubles,” went way up after that day, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But today, maybe everyone can learn from Ireland’s mistakes. Many Northern Irish Catholics saw Britain in the same light that some in Palestine view Israel, as aggressive invaders stealing land from the rightful owners. Some in the IRA trained with the PLO in Lebanon and murals on buildings in Belfast’s Catholic neighborhoods show Arab “freedom fighters” and IRA combatants fighting in solidarity.

But Ireland is no longer in the same place it was and has in fact made an enormous amount of progress since that time.

More and more people, including politicians and activists from Israel, Palestine, Sri Lanka and Iraq, are looking to the Northern Ireland agreement of 1998 as a model of conflict resolution.

Yes, Ireland is disturbed by yesterday’s events. Yes, yesterday is proof that achieving peace is a long and sometimes tragic journey.

But all of Ireland considers yesterday’s violence the desperate acts of radicals, not a campaign for a political or religious cause. Although nothing is certain in this world, I think yesterday, if anything, shows that peace can be possible with compromise, forgiveness and understanding. And maybe, if Ireland can prove this, there’s hope for the rest of the world, too.

— — Edited by Annie Vangsnes

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