​Cillian McGrattan: Nationalists just ignore the unionist trauma of the Troubles

It is accepted by all nationalists that reconciliation is inevitable – it is merely a matter of timing as to when unionists reconcile themselves to ending partition. There seems little awareness of what issues need to be reconciled before that when becomes even appropriate.

In the most recent issue of the journal Studies – an Irish Quarterly Review – the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, writes of how he believes that ‘reconciliation between the different traditions on this island is our best pathway to peace and prosperity’. There is little consideration within Mr Martin’s piece or any of the other articles about what those differences might be.

Perhaps the journal’s best article is by Professor John Coakley who points out that in the event of a reunification border poll: The nationalist historical narrative would have to be adjusted, national symbols would need to be reconfigured, and a specific challenge would be posed in the area of language, to mention just three fields of potential fracture’

One could add a fourth element to Coakley’s suggestion: An acknowledgement of unionism’s historic trauma (by the far the largest number of Troubles dead were victims of republicans). Coakley’s short paper does not develop what he means by the historical narrative. His focus in that regard is on the political culture of the republic.

It is more interesting that unionism and in particular, the unionist collective trauma of the ‘Troubles’ is not given any real consideration in what the most sustained and in-depth treatment of Irish reunification – namely, Professor Brendan O’Leary’s Making Sense of a United Ireland. O’Leary seems to understand the legacy of the conflict as something to be gotten over as he frames its impact as to do with culture and belief. For instance, after writing about policing ‘residual paramilitarism’, O’Leary suggests that “policies must be consistent with an Irish public policy that visibly demonstrates how British and Protestant rights and culture would be credibly upheld and sustained in a united Ireland”.

In the understandings of Mr Martin and Prof O’Leary, reconciliation is used as a noun – something that is an end in-itself, a goal or a destination. This is understandable because reconciliation does mean this. It is both a noun and a verb. But the verb form denotes an open-ended process or a journey to be negotiated and worked through. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement speaks not only of reconciliation but rapprochement – to bring together.

The two understandings, in some ways, can’t meet. There is a possibility of foreclosure within the noun version. Although O’Leary spends a great deal of time discussing the possibility of loyalist terrorists reverting to violence to oppose, the republican terror campaign does not much feature.

A new emphasis within constitutional nationalism, which can be distinguished from Provisional/Sinn Féin republicanism, occurs along that axis: Whereas republicans continue to celebrate IRA ‘volunteers’, nationalists ignore the past to focus on reunification. It is as if republican terror – and nationalist sneaking regard (or active support, as in the case of the tens of thousands who voted for and marched at the funeral of Bobby Sands) – were a blip that occurred after the civil rights era.

I have written before about this Vichy Syndrome of selective memory within Irish nationalism. The historian Tony Judt discusses one of the symptoms, by describing the tendency in post-War France to view the years of Occupation and the Pétain administration as the ‘parenthetical past’ – namely, that 1940 to 1944 did not really occur; the ‘true’ Republic remained exiled with De Gaulle and the passive acquiescence and active collaboration could be bracketed off as something not spoken about in polite society.

An example of this occurred in February when Professor Anna Bryson was asked by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee whether reconciliation should be left out of lawfare. In the video of proceedings (the web version of this article will link to it), she responds “You don’t solve 40 years of conflict— eight, or hundreds of years of conflict, if you wanted to go further back—in a short while.” The Freudian slip seemingly denotes that 40 years of ethnic killings pale in comparison to 800 years of colonial occupation.

Prof Bryson appeared with Alyson Kilpatrick, head of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and Professor Louise Mallinder – all are associated with the form of transitional justice, now limited mostly to Queen’s, that has been promoted by Professor Kieran McEvoy who was not present.

The type of narrative exemplified by Prof Bryson’s slip and emblematized in Prof O’Leary’s text is one that not only disarticulates unionists’ experience of the conflict – a mere four decades in the hundreds of years of oppression; it also works to delegitimise unionists’ existence in the present – rendering them mere colonists.

If they can stomach those understandings, unionists might wish to ask what exactly nationalists want them to reconcile with before the when occurs. But that almost seems moot.

Mr Martin went on to explain his understanding of reconciliation by referencing Patrick Kielty: ‘It’s easier to sing rebel songs about a United Ireland and not have it, than to not sing them and have it’. Surely, even a basic respect for the unionist tradition would entail criticising rather than valorizing Mr Kielty's witticism? It shouldn’t be beyond the Taoiseach to suggest that it would be better to not sing them at all?

• Dr Cillian McGrattan is a lecturer in Politics University of Ulster