What Three Killings Might Do To The World

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might make a trip to Northern Ireland sooner than planned.  Three murders in the last five days don’t seem cause for international alarm, but for those who remember The Troubles, the killings are foreboding.

It’s hard to believe, but decades before the world focused on the struggle between Islamic Fundamentalists and the West,  the war between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland was the most serious conflict on the globe.

On assignment; Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1988

“The Troubles”, as they’re called over there, are not a battle about religion; the Pope hasn’t been involved in 500 years.  It’s really about political dominance and economic opportunity.

For centuries, control of Ireland fell increasingly to the British, until a partition agreement in 1921 divided the island in two; the primarily Catholic Republic of Ireland in the south, and the Protestant Northern Ireland in the northeast corner,  governed as part of the United Kingdom.

While most of the population in each country accepted the split, political and economic advantage in Northern Ireland favored Protestants because theirs was the government in power.  Catholic rebels vowed to unite an independent Ireland; the loyalists or British were determined to keep their presence on the province.   It was a conflict that stewed as mostly a national story until the turbulent 1960s saw an outbreak of violence and hunger strikes and then it was on every TV in the world.

Central New York has close connections to Northern Ireland.  Like much of the Northeastern U.S., many of our ancestors emigrated from Ireland before the partition.  Our former Congressman James Walsh (R-NY) sponsored the Irish Peace Process Cultural and Training Program in 1998 and was an agent of the breakthrough Peace Accord that same year that removed the country from the headlines.

And an Irish woman named Kathleen Kelly settled in Syracuse and since 1980 has brought 6,500 pre-teens from Northern Ireland to central New York with the Project Children organization.  Kathleen hopes the children will return home after a summer with American host families to reverse decades of intolerance.  There is no purer form of detente than what a child sees.

Photojournalist Dan Roach tapes street scenes.

In 1988 I went to Northern Ireland with a producer and a photojournalist from WTVH-TV to research a report on Project Children.  We identified two children from Belfast who would come to Syracuse that summer, a Protestant boy and a Catholic girl to see what their life was like before their stay in the U.S..  Never did I fear for my safety as I did that one week.

The claims that Protestants had better housing, better education, and better jobs due to their majority rule in British Parliament was confirmed, and resentment among Catholics was complete.  Both sides had been killing each other since the 1960s so no one trusted anyone, including us.

When Dan Roach and Paul Burke and I stopped in a pub for a beer one night, the subtle questioning about our politics felt so much like surgery we got out of there sooner than you can say Londonderry.

Maureen with Sinead, a Project Children girl bound for Syracuse

We learned while taping our interviews, you’d better not stand too close to the tall concrete walls that divide Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, or the sound of your presence will prompt a rock or molotov cocktail thrown blindly from the other side.  We backed away many times.

Trouble at a wall which divides neighborhoods by religion.

If America is challenged by race, at least the combatants can  identify the enemy.  With much less to go on than the color of one’s skin, the information needed to practice your prejudice in Northern Ireland comes from where the other person lives and conducts his business, and because the interest in such things is so obvious, it’s considered as rude to bluntly ask for a person’s address as it is for us to ask “how much money do you make?”  So strangers go through a complex conversational dance to determine if the new acquaintance is a loyalist (Protestant) or a Republican (Catholic).  Sometimes mistakes are made and if the examiner is part of a paramilitary group he might order the wrong person be shot in the knee cap, a common form of intimidation and punishment in Northern Ireland.  In that case, sorry.

Paul and Dan, off the clock in Belfast

The landscape of a Belfast neighborhood, 1988

Not since 1999 has there been a political killing reported in Northern Ireland, but that changed Saturday with the fatal shooting of two British soldiers.  Monday a police officer was shot and killed.   An Irish paramilitary group claimed responsibility for all three.

Protestant and Catholic political leaders rushed to condemn the acts this week,  a rare unified statement observers hope will be enough to prevent more violence, but there’s a tense undercurrent.  In Northern Ireland,  an eye for an eye mentality usually answers three killings with three more. No one wants to return to the bloodshed that crippled this picturesque and culturally rich corner of the globe.

Keep an eye out for the news coming out of Northern Ireland.   In the meantime, I’ll submit a primer on The Troubles tomorrow.

Tagged as: Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, WTVH