In trying to explain the Irish to an Icelandic friend recently, I said that hope springs eternal from our well of despair. With four seasons in one day, and endless change blowing in from the Atlantic, we live with the certainty that you can rely on nothing. It was ever thus.
This is how we find ourselves, yet again, at the beginning of another marching season in Northern Ireland. We hope for the best and fear the worst.
Of course, it doesn t help that these rituals are increasingly incomprehensible to those living outside the North. There are so many other interesting things to do with your time, why would you want to spend it tramping hither and thither, often in the rain, and usually in or around some quite charmless locale, like a graveyard?
Moreover, you will usually be in the company of men, most of them angry, some of them drunk, and all driven by the sound of militarist rattle-tattle hammering and root-toot-tooting. The tunes may change from nationalist to loyalist, but the song remains the same.
Eloquent appeals have been made for accommodations on either side of the other s right to march, or to be left unmarched. Frankly, as far as I see it, if there were no marches and no commemorations there d be no need for appeals and compromises.
The more I think about it the weirder it gets. Tolerant as I am, I think there should be a moratorium on all marches and political or military remembrances for a decade. And I include Easter week and July 12th. Revive them ten years later if anyone remembered the point.
Look, there s supposedly a new millennium at hand, in the Christian world. Most of the tribal marchers claim to adhere to Christianity. Shouldn t they agree that the old history ends with 1999 and the new one begins, one with a shared culture of anti-militarism and no backward-looking?
Believe me, we ll have enough problems dealing with what the next millennium will throw at us without carrying the shite of the last one with us as well.
These observations are prompted by the news that there are dissensions among the paramilitaries on both sides in Northern Ireland, that the families of some dead republicans don t want Sinn Fein, or other partitionist parties to attend commemorations of their dead relatives, that nobody seems able to agree the final critical steps to take to move that benighted country into the 20th, much less the 21st, century . . .
There are, as you d expect in Spring, some tiny hopeful shoots pushing their way through the surface I like the proposal for a collective act of reconciliation which would encompass many things, including a start to decommissioning.
But, as you d expect in Northern Ireland, where there s hopeful shoots, there s big baleful blasts of wind trying to blow them away the idea was dismissed as an April Fool s charter by Ian Paisley. It hasn t gone down too well with the hard men on the other side either.
But, in another small step forwards for humanity, if not for the North, the IRA says it has located the burial places of nine of its murder victims. It is to be hoped that over the next weeks the remains of their battered bodies will be quietly exhumed and reburied, that the families will be able to achieve what counsellors call closure.
I suppose these reflections are given particular impetus by the scenes being relayed into our living rooms from Kosovo, and by the clear evidence of mass murder by the Serbs. Ethnic cleansing has been a fact of life in Northern Ireland for generations, but especially since 1969.
Meanwhile, Kosovo serves to warn us of how much worse Northern Ireland, and by extension the entire island, could get. It s a humanitarian catastrophe. And in terms of size and population, it s not all that different to Northern Ireland.
The idea that demolishing (was it degrading and ultimately destroying?) a country s infrastructure would stop the street-level murderers and paramilitary thugs should give pause for thought. Frankly, it was pretty clear what would happen once the bombers went in and NATO had guaranteed that it wasn t going to send in ground troops.
Now, Zelijko Raznatovic has arrived on the scene. This guy is also known as Arkan and he s the most notorious Serbian paramilitary commander. His forces have been involved in massacres before, in other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Mass murders have already been reported and documented in Kosovo. Worse is yet to come.
He has his counterparts in Ireland. And the present situation begs a question how do you deal with someone like this? Surely bombers and Cruise missiles destroying buildings and munitions dumps are going to miss this kind of person, who will slip-slide through the undergrowth in the dead of night?
There are no easy answers, regarding the taking out of Arkan or of the diehard tendency here. And sometimes, in the defence of the weak, or of concepts like democracy, you find yourself contemplating the unpalatable, the untenable.
The Hog