If you are a regular reader of Position Papers you may have realised by now that we follow no particular political line. Inspired by St Josemaría Escrivá’s dictum that in politics there are no dogmas, we don’t consider that it is in place for a magazine dedicated to presenting and exploring the application of Catholic teaching to the burning questions of the day, to present genuinely political positions as “Catholic”. That said, there are of course matters in the political realm which transcend politics, and are of religious import, broadly speaking. These questions comprise the social teaching of the Church and include, for example, the life and dignity of the human person, the family, the option for the poor and vulnerable. Within this body of social teaching, the Church deals with the question of the principles governing the legitimate use of violence to defend oneself (see Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 497 ff).
This month I would like to dedicate the editorial to some reflections on our national attitude to the campaign of violence engaged in by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. These reflections are occasioned by recent statements and actions of politicians and others in the wake of our recent elections which appear to romanticise or legitimate the violence of the IRA. For examples, we have seen recently elected public representatives singing songs extolling the IRA, and others referring to their acts of violence as a “war”.
According to the Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN), a research project at the University of Ulster, the IRA was responsible for at least 1,705 deaths over the course of its thirty year campaign: British soldiers, police officers, and civilians. All the men, women and children (numbering some dozens) killed by the IRA were the victims of a terrorist campaign, not a justified war. In other words, not one of those killings was what the Church would term “justified homicide”. Members of the IRA consciously and unjustly murdered almost two thousand human beings.
This is not to ignore the provocations which led young Irish men and women to turn to violence from the late 1960s onwards. In The Volunteer: A Former IRA Man’s True Story, Derry man Shane Paul O’Doherty describes how a combination of nationalist literature and provocation by British soldiers led him to sign up for the IRA in 1970 and how the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of thirteen innocent civilians by the SAS in Derry led him to re-establish his links with the IRA. Nor is it to deny that Loyalist groups carried on a murderous campaign of violence of their own during this period.
However to understand motives is not to justify the subsequent actions, and what the IRA did in the name of Irish freedom was unjustifiable. Their 1,705 murders are a terrible stain on Irish history. To sing “rebel” songs honouring the men who carried them out, or to justify these actions with the appellation “war” is to compound those crimes.
What is more, our national ambiguity about the IRA campaign is to plant the seeds for its rekindling in time to come. What is needed is a national acknowledgment that these actions were crimes, and that they were committed by our fellow Irish men and women, and that to some degree they were doing this in our name. Unfortunately it is almost impossible for us Irish to see ourselves as anything others than victims: victims of British imperialist policies, victims of Unionist bigotry or victims of Loyalist violence. But for thirty years Irish people were amongst the aggressors. They committed most awful atrocities. Let us not extol their actions but rather feel our guilt by association. And let us pray to God for forgiveness for ourselves, reconciliation with our traditional “enemies” and that our country be spared from the rekindling of the awful scourge of fratricidal violence.