It was 30 years ago today

I must confess, it rather sneaked up on me. Thirty years since Bloody Sunday. How time flies, even if you don’t remember it first time round. How much has transpired from the massive seminal man-made catastrophe, and how settled we’ve become with everything that followed. To the point where today’s headlines feature sectarian rioting and murders in Belfast. And you have to ask – has anything changed?

Not a lot. The week before last, twenty year old postal worker Daniel McColgan of Newtonabbey was shot dead by the Red Hand Defenders. He was killed as he arrived for work in the sorting office in Rathcoole, an overwhelmingly British (I use the word deliberately) suburb of Belfast.

The deed provoked the usual heartfelt condemnations all round. People of all hues spoke of the tragedy, the barrenness of sectarianism, the need to root out this evil...

And you’d have to agree. But it’s instructive to study the response to the two films marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Many reviewers in Ireland and the United Kingdom have chosen to see them as apologies for the IRA and its 30-year terrorist war.

They’re wrong. What happened happened. It can’t be denied. Northern Ireland has been a sectarian cess-pit since the 1880s at the very least. And it had been boiling over for thirty months before Bloody Sunday. When the British Army’s Parachute Regiment butchered a baker’s dozen of innocent people on Derry’s streets, they free-sprayed petrol on a roaring fire.

That is not to condone the monstrosities perpetrated by terrorists, republican or otherwise. Many war crimes were committed in Northern Ireland over the thirty years, and the war criminals were rarely caught. Take the La Mon bomb, for example, or Enniskillen, or Omagh.

The critics of the Bloody Sunday films say that nobody has made a film about Protestant pain and loss. And they’re right. But why haven’t they? And why should this be a bar on Bloody Sunday recollections? Let somebody go and make such a film. It’s an important story to tell.

But also, let such a film explore the particular stony cold-blooded sectarianism of Northern Irish loyalists. As regular readers will know, this column has excoriated the hypocrisy, manipulations and murderousness of republicans. Over the years they could slaughter ordinary workers in a bus at a crossroads and still claim to be the victims. But for all their mean-spiritedness, mealy-mouthing and whinging, for all their sophistry and selectivity, no republican murderer ever matched the sheer coldness of the loyalist killers, from the Shankill Butchers to the Red Hand Defenders.

Here and there I have heard people suggest that the best solution would be to give every disgruntled loyalist a gift of a quarter of a million pounds sterling and a free transfer to a town of his or her choice in Scotland (to be forfeited if s/he returned!). I’m not suggesting it. You couldn’t do it. We have to keep trying to move forward. That said, it would be a lot cheaper for the British Government, and that’s for sure!

But at least the Government is out of the firing line today. We’re back where we were in 1969. Which is more than you can say for our mirror horror in Palestine. The last report from there I studied in any depth described the use by the Israeli army of fleshette shells or ‘nail bullets’. These shells embed hundreds of tiny nails in their targets, and the Israelis appear to be using them against civilians.

They don’t seem to have learned anything from history. They have not understood that such atrocities breed counter-atrocities, that official murder begets terrorist murder, and that the legitimate Government can be compromised and betrayed by the violence, criminality and stupidity of its own agents, that is, security forces. It happened in Northern Ireland. It happened in the Basque country. It’s how it is.

The path that the Israelis have taken under Ariel Sharon has only one logical conclusion. For peace on the terms they have set out, they will have to obliterate the Palestinians. And that they cannot do. Somebody needs to shout stop.

Meanwhile, I see that Ireland recorded the third highest level of increase in immigration per head of population in the EU in 2001, according to the official European statistics office Eurostat.

Only Luxembourg and Spain had higher rates. Ireland had twice the rate of the UK and Greece. Austria, Germany and Denmark were lower still and France was at the bottom. Ireland also had the highest birth rate. At last, a realistic picture of what’s happening.

It might seem like a bizarre lateral thought to move from that subject to the impact of the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the eastern Congo, but bear with me, it’s not.

You’ve seen the pictures, floods of lava, exploding fuel depots, the airport runway destroyed along with most of the city of Goma. There’s a risk of cholera and possibly a secondary disaster if underwater poisonous gas in Lake Kivu is released by the lava. So, hundreds of thousands are on the move, all at major risk of hunger and disease.

When we look at pictures of the hordes streaming away from their homes in the Congo, contemplating life in a tent and subsisting on charity rations (and I don’t mean pretzels), we would do well to consider how we would feel ourselves should such a catastrophe come to pass (think, disaster at Sellafield). After all, in the two years preceding Bloody Sunday, it happened on this island, when hundreds fled pogroms in Belfast.

And in such consideration, we might begin to understand (again) what refuge actually means. And we might be a bit more generous in our response to those who wash up on our shores in search of succour. After all, we might be in the same boat ourselves sometime.