Hate Is all Around

In the past I have expressed the angst of a columnist. I write these lines a week before you get to read them. It's the way it is. But at a moment like this, one cavils. One blanches. Who knows what's going to happen tomorrow?

We might have bombs on Serbia. We might have decommissioning in Northern Ireland. We might have a new bishop in Wexford . . . We might have rain.

This is another hinge of history. Just like that. The civilised world contemplates barbarism in Serbia. I mean, the West thinks about doing the indefensible, and bombing the Serbs. Who, whatever their anti-Fascist credentials from World War II, have demonstrated themselves to be latter-day thugs and butchers.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, another bunch of thugs and fascists murder a solicitor for doing her job.

What do you do with such people? More to the point, how do you catch them in the first place, when the very police force which is supposed to be doing the detection is understood to be corrupted? If it were not, why would the Chief Constable ask for assistance from outside, including the FBI??

These are bleak and dangerous times, here and in the Balkans. And the situations have much in common. Moreover, we have much to learn. Specifically, we should remember that monstrosity is just below the surface. And ethnic cleansing has been going on throughout Northern Ireland for decades.

Of course, the Catholics are under pressure in Portadown. But the Protestants are under equal if not greater pressure elsewhere, like the Fermanagh border.

I am not being in the least bit unsympathetic when I say this. I understand the horrors and the fears and the intimidation which Catholics in the murder triangle encounter, culminating in the murder of Rosemary Nelson.

But I also know that Protestant families have been annihilated along the border. And in the heat and the horror of the present, we can forget these things. As in the Balkans, this is a war with no innocents, except children.

I won't win any friends on either side for these remarks. Each wants the enemy fingered as the baddy. But it isn't that simple.

Far from it. In truth, large numbers on both sides have tacitly or expressly approved of a catalogue of crimes, beginning with basic low grade but constant intimidation. Smaller numbers have acquiesced in mass murder. But without those larger snakin' regarders maybe less would accept atrocities.

I don't know. I really don't know. But I think that's how it is. And it means that very large numbers of people are tainted.

It also means that the kind of murderous ethnic cleansing that we have seen in Bosnia and now Kosovo, which has warranted the growing threat of bombing by NATO, could break out in Northern Ireland.

So, should NATO consider bombing the homes of the still-elusive warlords in the murder triangle? If you were certain that they'd get them, how strenuously would you object?

But it also raises another, and so far unmentionable, possibility, that of re-partition. I know it would mean major relocations of population and effective ethnic cleansing, but it could at least be done without large-scale loss of life.

It would mean a 30-county Ireland (giving nationalist bits of Armagh and Down to Monaghan and Louth) with a 2-county UK rump, possibly part of the independent Scotland. It would mean Belfast being abandoned as an Irish city, and Derry's great Apprentice Boy tradition being consigned to history. But it would also mean an end to so many appalling vistas as well.

What do you think?

Meanwhile, the European Commission resigned last week, after a report which damned a few, but much less than the Beef Tribunal, or indeed than we may expect the Flood and Moriarty tribunals to do.

Of course there was corruption, and there hasn't been a single tear shed, anywhere, for Edith Cresson. But if everything is reduced to scale, what went wrong was small beer.

In fact, the resignation of the Commission, and their acceptance of the principle of collective responsibility, may have ramifications far beyond Brussels, in terms of political culture. We needn't look at our political system for parallels. Instead, we can take the Catholic Church in Ireland.

The recent suicide of the appalling Father Sean Fortune allows us to apply the Commission standard to the Catholic church. Let's be clear. According to the Irish Times, Bishop Brendan Comiskey, who was Fortune's superior, was informed of the priest's paedophile activity on at least four occasions in the 1980s and in 1990. But no action was taken.

Now, if Comiskey was a European Commissioner, wouldn't we want him to quit? But of course, Commissioners are appointed by Governments, and bishops are appointed by God . . . Commissioners may sometimes act like gods, but bishops act as God's anointed.

You could equate Comiskey, and virtually every other member of the Catholic hierarchy, with Bill Clinton, I suppose. Not responsible and won't resign. Put on your teflon soutane each morning and bob's yer uncle . . . nothing sticks . . .

Surely it's time for all democrats to confront this absurd situation!??!

Resign, Godammit!!

The Hog