Why is there enmity between Irish nationalists and Irish republicans?
The recent election revealed once again that this enmity is alive and unwell. It should not be so. But it is.
It goes back a long way. In the bad old days when Stormont was dominated by a single unionist party we were sometimes given strange advice, namely, that if there was an election contest between unionists and republicans (or socialists, or socialist republicans) we were in conscience bound to vote unionist. Yes, unbelievable though it seems, that is what we were told. Told by nationalist politicians, even by preachers. We were conscience-bound, they said, to vote unionist to keep out the republicans, the socialists, the communists.
If you can't get a nationalist in, they said, keep the republicans out. Even by electing a unionist!
Yet the difference between nationalist and republican was sometimes hard to see. Republicans were more radical, of course. And while nationalists would probably have settled for some measure of self-government under the control of Westminster, the republicans would not settle for that, they wanted independence. Republicans wanted us to make our own foreign policy, our own financial policy, our own military policy, our own tax laws, regulate our own agriculture and fisheries etc, etc. So the term 'united Ireland' meant different things to different people. It could mean Ireland united and free to create its own government, or an Ireland united but free only in some things, not in others – for instance, London would still control our foreign policy and our finances.
There were other differences too but we were always puzzled by the enmity between two sets of parties who both wanted Irish freedom of some kind.
That enmity showed itself in the recent election. For instance one nationalist (SDLP) politician said angrily that those of us who voted for Sinn Féin did so because we were under the control of the IRA and were made to do so.
Fundamentalist preachers in the bad old days used to say much the same thing about us, they said those of us who voted for a united Ireland were under orders from the Pope to do it! Also, they said, those of us who voted socialist were under the control, and perhaps even in the pay of, Moscow.
The basic insult contained in all this blether is that we the people are incapable of making up our minds for ourselves. We are the victims of force, of fear, of base desires from which the better kind of people are free. And such nonsense persists as long as there are people willing to create it. When unionist and nationalist politicians abused us for the way we voted, what they were saying was, "You are the lower classes who cannot be expected to make up your own minds, who always expect to be told what to do by other people." So the nationalist and unionist theory said, "We, the nationalists or unionists, or both together, must lead them, we must even dominate them. They need to be told what to do because by themselves they are incapable of knowing and will be influenced by dubious alternatives."
That, of course, is a class thing. Old Karl Marx was right sometimes. So was James Connolly. So was William Thompson. So is anybody who sees that there is a lot of class-bound thinking in the present Irish/British conflict.
Even up to late in the last century some academics were still saying that "members of the working class cannot think about anything except what they can see in front of them, they cannot provide for the future, they demand immediate satisfaction, like children." Those times are not so far away and such thoughts are still found in some members of the Dáil and the British House of Commons.
The Minister for Justice down below there in the Dáil once referred to a socialist deputy as a Marxist, a Trotskyist and a Maoist or whatever, never understanding that you may be one or other of these but hardly likely to be all of them at once. Michael McDowell thus showed that the most bizarre of the ideas of the last century were not officially discredited.
Much of the idealism of the old Nationalist Party has continued in the SDLP. Putting the terms social, democratic and labour into the name of the party was a means of uniting the founding members into one party rather than a means of defining what the new party really was. The mistrust of socialists and republicans still remained, one of its legacies from the past, glossed over but never disappeared. It is still there and the recent election showed this in stark terms.
That is a pity. If ever there was a time when people needed a strong, united, radical, democratic voice it is now. Not to put a tooth in it, Sinn Féin and the SDLP should be struggling together, not against each other.
Antoine de Saint Exupery said that love is not people gazing fixedly at each other, it is people looking together in the same direction. Political idealism is much the same. There is room for us all. True, struggling republicans and ruling Catholics have not really trusted each other since the American revolution against King George, the French revolution in 1789 or the Irish revolution in 1798, not since the Russian revolution in 1917, not since the great Irish revolution in 1916. Christians have always favoured anointed kings rather than elected presidents.
But all that is changing. Even the Pope has given up his crowns as a sign that those days are over.
The war between ruling Catholics and struggling republicans should be over too, and the enmity between nationalists and republicans.
Not only is there room for us all, there is a need for us all.
So let's get on with it.
