The historic statement by the IRA just over a week ago will hopefully inspire all Irish people to seek new ways of having improved relationships with each other. It also gives us a chance to re-assess, in a less impassioned way, the role the IRA had in society. Did it succeed in its aims and its effect on each one of us? This task will be carried on at greater speed in the months and years to come and we will come to better understand what was going on in our country during days where there was no such thing as an independent observer.
And already the blatant inaccuracies are spewing out with greater speed than ever. One of the least challenged is one I have heard recently is that over 3,000 deaths were due to terrorism, an attempt to blame the IRA for every death over the last 35 years. While this may make for great soundbite nonsense (they want you to make the connection between a war in Ireland and the awful mass murder on 9/11), the shortsightedness of this argument leaves out the fact that the British government were responsible for a large proportion of these deaths, including innocent civilians. The logic then says that these acts by the British government were acts of terrorism.
But I don't intend to rake over what dangerous people who have made no contribution to peace are saying.
There is a story still to be written and one part in this re-examination is to understand that the conflict meant totally different things in different parts of the six counties. It beat to a different rhythm in the city as compared to the country, particularly in places like the border areas of south Tyrone and north Fermanagh where my people come from. While memories of Bombay Street still remain strong in Belfast and helped strengthen the IRA, the experience in some parts of the countryside were different.
My first recollection of the 'war' was not gun battles but of armed men on the hillside watching while local people opened up a border road, blowing up cement bollards which cut communities in half. Their presence was more of encouragement for the locals and I doubt if they would have really engaged the British army on these hillsides. But this, to most people, was not a political act, it was more an effort to sort out a problem of daily life, and as such sometimes people from 'the other side of the house' were involved or supported it.
One part of life in these areas was that all parts of the community actually did get on and most people recognised the validity of the other's point of view. I know of unionists lining out with nationalists on local GAA teams up until quite recently and this move was reciprocated in the soccer teams.
There was one act which stood out for me, a story about my grandfather. His sleán, the turf spade, was broken and he couldn't get it fixed because there was a boycott on the shop where he got it, a shop owned by a prominent Orangeman. He was stuck until a Protestant neighbour asked why he was not out working.
When he found out he said that he would bring it back for him as he was not boycotting the shop. And he was true to his word.
Let us hope that what the IRA has done a week and a half ago will allow us to get to know our neighbours in the same intimate way and that we will regain the human respect for each other which sometimes we lost.
