On the banality of peace
If tragedy appals and evokes empathy, then happier events often give way to pleasant banality. Yesterday was of the latter kind. There seemed little to add to the promise of Northern Ireland’s new political leadership to build a new future, other than to wish them well in realising that promise and let them get on with it.Northern Ireland has had many days in the global sun, and mostly at the expense of some now long-forgotten individual or family. Those of us who lived through its worst days will have our own particular memory of the often arbitrary way in which lives were snuffed out. Or how we lived our extremely ordinary lives with extraordinary danger lurking in the background.
By yesterday’s historic day, 3,722 had lost their lives as a direct result of the Troubles. Many more had them foreshortened, through injury or stress. The businessman who eeked out the rest of his life in silence after avoiding injury from a gunman who sprayed his Belfast pub with automatic gunfire, killing three customers – his son narrowly escaping through a back door. Another who, during the 1970s was bombed out of three premises, and marched at gunpoint out of two. The farmer, forced to stand shotgun while his brother performed some simple chore on the family land. The mother who trembled from head to toe at the sound of each mortar fire, or gunshot, for the kids she’d left playing in the street outside.
For many, now, the only compensation for two disrupted generations of abduction, murder, protectionism, destruction and displacement is the relatively modest one of a settled democratic future. Yet, as Frank Millar notes in today’s Irish Times, that future is far from settled:
Can this be “a settlement” capable of forging what we have never known before – namely a common allegiance to Northern Ireland? It is plainly in the unionist interest that it should. But how over time will that sit alongside Sinn Féin’s commitment to political process providing the transition to Irish unity? They made history here yesterday. But they didn’t end it.
Some will be angry, disappointed or just plain sorrowful that two such fundamentalist figures have finally done what they once promised their supporters they would never do. But many more will be relieved that they have found another way to settle their differences.