(Dobbs) Biden Saw Peace, But Not A Perfect Peace
Northern Ireland has come light years from The Troubles, but some walls still stand.
About ten years ago, I was in Northern Ireland to shoot a documentary about how far they’ve come there after the end of “The Troubles,” the deadly warfare that started in the 1960s between Catholics and Protestants, which in the two decades that followed I covered for ABC News. During the shoot, I asked a trusted friend in Belfast to look at something I wrote. When he came to a phrase I’d used about “religious warfare,” he stopped. “It was warfare, but it was not religious,” he told me. “Most of the people who did the killing never darkened the door of a church.”
It’s probably true. To be sure, it was Catholic paramilitary groups like the Irish Republican Army doing battle with Protestant paramilitaries like the Ulster Volunteer Force. The attacks by each religion’s factions against the other’s made the contempt crystal clear. Over the years, I heard vile venom about religion from both sides. I likened it to the ugly religious hatred I’d seen in the Middle East.
But my friend was right. Those attacks, that contempt of each other’s religion, were a byproduct of The Troubles, not the cause.
The cause was economic.
When Ireland won its independence from Britain a little more than a century ago, the only concentration of Protestants in the predominantly Catholic nation was in the northern counties, known then and now as Ulster. There, they were the majority. So the Protestant North stayed loyal to, and officially a part of, Britain. And the Catholics became second-class citizens. Once when I asked a Catholic terrorist from the brutal terror group, the IRA, why he was at war with the Protestants, his answer was, “My people can’t get a job in the shipyards,” (which were the province’s biggest employer and where, incidentally, the Titanic was built), “they can’t get a job with the Royal Ulster Constabulary,” (which was the police force), “they can’t get a job anywhere that Protestants are pulling the strings, and they pull all the strings.”
It was flat-out discrimination and he was not far off. It was warfare over who would get the good jobs, who would police the population, who would control the government. The answer had always been, Protestants.
So the IRA and other groups set out to use violence to separate Ulster from Britain and reunite it with the Catholic Republic of Ireland.
In turn, Protestant paramilitary groups declared their allegiance to the Queen and, joined by the British Army— with 30,000 soldiers stationed in the province at its peak— fought back with violence of their own. Belfast in particular often felt like Beirut or Baghdad. Civil rights were suspended, barbed wire ran down the middle of streets, sandbags and steel barricades protected shops, snipers fired from hidden positions, explosive bombs were set off in pubs, firebombs were hurled at the forces of the other side. More than once my own hotel, where most foreign journalists stayed, was bombed.
During a riot following the death of a man named Bobby Sands, the first out of ten IRA convicts to die while protesting their imprisonment with hunger strikes, my camera crew and I jumped into an alleyway to avoid some crossfire and almost tripped over a group of young boys playing with miniature molotov cocktails, the way young boys in America would play Cowboys and Indians. Violence was a staple in their lives. Hatred seemed like it seeped into their DNA.
By the end of the warfare, some 3,500 people had died.
Thankfully for the overwhelming majority of both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, that is now history. Not just the deaths, but the hatred, the violence. Things have changed in such a positive way that a dozen years ago, National Geographic Traveler Magazine put Belfast on its list of the world’s Top Twenty tourist destinations. That’s what President Biden went yesterday to see.
And with a pact both sides signed 25 years ago called the Good Friday Agreement, leaders from both religions made a plan to share in the governance of Northern Ireland. In fact today, a political party called Sinn Fein, which grew from the IRA, emphasizes healthcare and education more than unity with the Republic of Ireland, and is the leading party in the province. The Agreement has had a rocky life but at least, since it was signed, the bloodshed that tore Northern Ireland apart has ended. That’s what President Biden went yesterday to celebrate.
While the status quo today is much more than just a truce, it falls somewhere short of a perfect peace. People who once might have ambushed one another now work together, dine together, play together, and maybe most important, share power together. Northern Ireland has traveled light years since The Troubles. But as an Irish journalist said to me, “We dance on a pinhead before declaring our allegiances, our identity, it’s in our DNA, and no matter how liberalized you wish to think you are, that sentiment is still beneath your fingernails.”
That’s why, now 25 years after The Troubles ended, you’ll still see murals around Belfast depicting armed militiamen, a way to mark out territory and make it clear that everyone hasn’t put the past behind.
You’ll still see walls originally erected to protect people from violence still separating some traditionally Protestant neighborhoods from traditionally Catholic neighborhoods. These days they call them “peace walls” but they are segregating walls nonetheless.
In the documentary, we asked whether these “peace walls” might ever come down. Everyone told us pretty much the same thing: if they do, it won’t be by government decree. It will be when the people who live on both sides of the walls feel safe enough to dismantle them.
The bloodshed in Northern Ireland is past. The bad blood isn’t. Not quite. Not all of it. It is a state of peace. But not a perfect peace.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
What a life you have had, Greg! Lot's of respect for your wisdom. We need help in the US...would you run for president?
Thanks Greg. My first week of college, Bernadette Devlin gave a public lecture and emphasized that the conflict was economic, not religious. Years later no surprise that among groups the temperatures still simmer, yet progress in tamping down such conflicts is always incremental.