This time last year I tried do get Fr Alec Reid to talk to me about his role in bringing about the IRA ceasefire of 1994. He wouldn't do it.
I was making a television documentary for TG4 and had managed to interview most of the protagonists, including John Hume and Gerry Adams, former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and former British premier John Major, as well as former military activists from the IRA and the loyalists.
Gerry Adams in particular – John Hume as well – was adamant that Fr Reid had played an early and pivotal role in bringing those two political leaders together in the hope that they could agree on an alternative route for nationalism that would allow republicans to consider setting aside the gun and the bomb.
My programme aimed to show how that alternative was indeed brought about, but Fr Reid declined to take part. I must have spoken to him on four or five occasions to try to get him to change his mind, but no dice.
He was particularly concerned that his recent role in helping the Basque people develop their own Peace Process might be jeopardised if it appeared that he was prepared to talk to the media about sensitive issues with regard to the Irish situation.
Even though the events I was interested in had taken place more than 10 years previously, Fr Reid still said no. And that was fair enough, we just had to go and make our programme without him.
So you can see why I was quite surprised to see him becoming embroiled in a slagging match on television with Unionists.
I don't know Fr Reid. Aside from the few telephone conversations I had with him last year in which I did my level best to bring him on board for the Sos Cogaidh programme, I have never spoken to him. Can't ever remember meeting him, even.
But I know from talking to others that Alec Reid is a thoroughly decent and honest person, a man so totally opposed to violence that he spent his years – not to mention his health – struggling to find a way to help bring about a situation in which political violence no longer played a part in Irish life.
There is no point at this stage further joining the media past time of crucifying Fr Reid. Nor do I intend to add my halfpenny worth to the debate of what he actually meant.
I could prove to you here and now that the way the Unionists treated the Nationalists in the North from the beginning of the state until the end of the Stormont regime was akin to how the Nazis treated those opposed to them in Germany. I could also prove the opposite.
I could even show that Unionists were treated in a Nazi-like fashion by Nationalists. It doesn't matter. Father Reid made comments that he regretted for the offence they caused, and he made a full and contrite public apology. Case closed.
But all that does not mean that the Troubles here were not brought about by a particular situation.
There was a time – up until the Hunger Strikes of 1981, I'd say – when the British were fond of portraying the IRA as mindless men of violence.
Sort of pathological murderers and criminals who wreaked havoc and devastation all around them because, well, because that's the sort of people they were. Needless to say, that whole ideal was a load of cobblers and the British themselves abandoned it.
Some Unionists still adhere to this idea, however, and continue to kid themselves that the only thing ever wrong with Northern Ireland was those murdering Catholics who tried to bomb their Unionist neighbours into a united Ireland.
In fact, it was the behaviour of the Unionist government at Stormont – with the active participation of many sectors of the Unionist community – that caused the Troubles to come about.
I don't even think it was partition, per se. Had the Stormont authorities provided the Catholics of the Six Counties with equality of employment, proper housing, educational and cultural rights, parity of esteem. . . had they made Northern Ireland a warm, Irish house for Catholics and Protestants alike, then there simply would not have been any war.
I am sure that Nationalists would have continued to lobby for inclusion in the Irish nation, but without the discrimination, the gerrymander, the bad housing. . . without being denied the vote, or being treated as second-class citizens. . . without the horrors of institutionalised sectarianism there would have been no armed, Nationalist revolt.
And had the state not taken up arms – both legally through the police and army, and illegally through the loyalist paramilitaries – in order to oppress the Catholic population, the Nationalists would not have had to form and sustain the IRA to protect them.
These things happened. The Northern state was sectarian and corrupt to the core.
It was Orange, anti-Catholic and wrong. And it was nurtured and sustained by the Unionist people, and the inevitable result was war.
The Northern Ireland state, the Unionist state and the Unionist people created the conditions that led to the Troubles that resulted in death and devastation for almost 30 years.
Thank God it is over.
