Liam Kennedy: Republicans have thrown up a smokescreen around their killings of Protestants

I was present at the inaugural lecture by the great John Whyte, many years ago, when he wondered if the Northern Ireland conflict was the most intensively studied of all the conflicts in the world at that time. The claim may well be true still. And yet, what this study shows is that we still need deeper understandings of the last 50 or so years of conflict.

On the Margins of History is divided into three parts.

The first part is quite theoretical, exploring collective memory and the problems of remembering and indeed forgetting – mainly due to Cillian, I would imagine.

The second brings painfully into the light the experience of intimidation, terror and trauma that was the lot of Protestants in Fermanagh during the Troubles. This revolves around fieldwork conducted by Ken in his native localities within the county.

Do we need to remind ourselves that in the beautiful lakeland landscape of County Fermanagh, of the 116 Troubles-related deaths, 90% of those killed were of Protestants?

Does this reverberate in the minds and consciences of nationalists in Fermanagh? It would seem not unduly, as republican candidates have been returned to Stormont in election after election in that very area. I come from a nationalist background and I have to say: ‘We are a very forgiving people’. We are particularly good at forgiving ourselves.

The final part of the book opens out onto wider reflections on the legacies of conflict, the rewriting of history, and the marginalisation of the Protestant experience of terror in border areas.

I should add there is a fine foreword by Henry Patterson, who anticipated more than a few things I might have said.

So, to attempt a summing up of the scope of the book: it is about Fermanagh Protestants’ time on the cross, and also about drawing out from these specific experiences insights on memory, trauma, memorialisation and representations of the past.

Let me mention two big facts, two statistics, that to my mind haunt the text and tell us so much about where we are at currently:

First, 90% of the killings during the last 50 years were due to paramilitaries – the IRA, INLA, UVF, UDA. All were unlawful killings. And you can add in woundings, including ‘punishment’ attacks, bombings and arson, most of which were also due to paramilitary organisations.

By contrast, the state security forces were responsible for just under 10% of deaths.

And yet the human rights industry in this society directs its gaze almost exclusively to violations by the state. Anyone from the CAJ or the Pat Finucane Human Rights Centre, or the third part of the triad, the human rights lawyers in my own university, might like to comment on the Nelsonian blind eye being shown to human rights violations by paramilitaries.

The second big statistic is that almost 70% of northern nationalists believe that there was no other way to achieve reform in NI except by resort to political violence. In other words, the murderous campaign of the IRA was justified.

The ethno-centrism and myopia involved in this is truly astonishing. No serious student of the Troubles would accept this narrative, the assumption that there was no alternative. As Ken and Cillian point out, a whole raft of reforms had been achieved by the end of 1969, and others followed. Yet the remarkable thing is that, blind to the history of the period, so many of our people accept a propagandist narrative that serves a contemporary political agenda. The dense smoke screen that now obscures the obscenity of atrocities in the past is a truly astonishing achievement by the republican movement.

This is, I think, what Ken and Cillian mean by the Vichy Syndrome: the convenient forgetting and excision of layers of our past, in the process failing to acknowledge the suffering that has been inflicted on the ‘other’.

Among the lessons I take away from this book are:

l we must not forget;

l we must acknowledge the suffering inflicted on others;

l we must assign responsibility to the perpetrators of violence; and

l we must not take the easy way out by conflating the status of perpetrators and victims.

Let me pick up on just one life, one person, one killer:

One of the most prolific assassins along the border was a man called Jim Lynagh. It was an easy sport for him and his fellow killers: a quick dash across the border, a part-time, off-duty UDR man in their sights, a volley of shots, and then back across a border that was sometimes only a few hundred metres away. Other times, the victim was simply a Protestant farmer or businessman with no connection with the security forces.

Yet, Lynagh’s life was celebrated not so long ago, as a hero of the Provisional IRA struggle, by none other than the leader of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, and she a possible future taoiseach in Dublin. It can’t have lost her a single vote – a striking reminder of the extent to which republican violence is being normalised and absorbed into a comforting mythology of heroic struggle.

Here’s a suggestion: might it make sense to hold a commemoration once a year for someone like Jim Lynagh, matched with a loyalist killer like Lennie Murphy, but a commemoration that is critical, evidence-based rather than celebratory? Maybe on the annual Human Rights Day, 10 December? It might help in rolling back the very deliberate glorifications of violence, and its practitioners, that currently prevail.

Finally, finally, the book is expensive, I have to admit, but it is well worth the price. This is a book for the times we are in and the years to come.

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l Liam Kennedy is emeritus professor of history, Queen's University Belfast