Patrick Roche: Moral blindness and hatred are deeply rooted in Irish nationalism and IRA's terror campaign

Abraham was interested in the moral issue of how it is possible for very ordinary individuals to carry on their everyday lives and at the same time, on a daily basis, commit acts of extraordinary and horrendous wickedness.

Abraham attributed the capacity for evil to a moral blindness which causes an inversion of morality - that is, the understanding of what is intrinsically evil as actually intrinsically good.

This moral blindness is deeply rooted in Irish nationalism and fully exemplified in the writings of Patrick Pearse, who was executed as a leader of the Easter Rising and was the ideological fountainhead of twentieth century Irish republicanism.

Pearse wrote in The Coming Revolution that ‘bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing’. The moral connotation of the word ‘bloodshed’ suggests the horror and brutality of violence but nevertheless Pearse regarded it as something intrinsically good - a ‘cleansing and sanctifying thing’.

This Pearsean moral blindness permeates Irish nationalism and was the root of the depravity that enabled the leadership and activists of the IRA to indulge in indiscriminate murder for thirty years, causing the death of approximately 3,500 and injury (most of it horrific) of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

The depravity was reinforced by hatred. The Catholic magistrate Tom Travers wrote, years after the event, that when he looked into the faces of the IRA terrorists who attempted to murder him and his wife and who murdered his young 22-year-old daughter as they walked home from Sunday Mass on April 8, 1984, that he saw a ‘hatred from the depths of Hell itself’.

The thirty-year killing and injury directed against the citizens of Northern Ireland, which also extended to the British mainland and Europe, is the legacy of Irish republican terrorism.

The Sinn Fein president, Mary Lou McDonald, in a recent speech on February 27, commemorating the life of the deceased IRA leader Brendan McFarlane, stated that “it was a life well lived, a life that shaped a legacy that will inspire generations to come”.

McFarlane did indeed shape a legacy, but it was a legacy of death and destruction.

To regard such a legacy as inspirational is a classic example of the moral blindness about which Abraham wrote.

This means that moral blindness is not confined to those who actually planned and carried out the terrorist acts but extends to the political leadership of Sinn Fein who now seek to legitimise and honour the perpetrators and effectively efface from history the suffering of the innocent victims of republican terrorism.

The IRA legacy to which the Sinn Fein president referred is worthy not of commemoration but only of shame.

Unionists can look back to a diametrically different legacy of which they can be justifiably proud.

John Wilson Foster, in a recent News Letter article (Rubio praise for Ulster is prompt to unionists to balance stories on past, February 21), delineated the Ulster-Scots’ “intellectual culture” that underpinned the remarkable industrialisation of Belfast and Lagan Valley and which the Ulster-Scots emigrants “transplanted from Ulster to the New World” as the basis of their contribution, in virtually every field, to the development of the United States.

The logic of Professor Wilson’s contribution is that unionism must ‘recall its legacy’ to ‘rediscover its intellectual roots’ and the ‘virtues of its heritage’ in order to effectively counter the existential threat of a morally bankrupt Irish nationalism.

Patrick J Roche is President of North Down TUV. He was a Stormont MLA for Lagan Valley between 1998 and 2003