David Adams: Let’s talk about the reality of being a Protestant in Ireland

I HAVE a lot of time for this Irish government, not least for the support it gives to a variety of Northern Ireland community groups that are (genuinely) engaged in tortuous, and sometimes dangerous, work on reconciliation.

However, to date it’s been a different story where the past is concerned.

I’m afraid its attitude on that front has been strikingly similar to that of our many exclusive-victimhood claimants.

Hopefully this latest legacy initiative by the Irish and British governments will prove to be different, but the signs are not good.

David Adams: Let’s talk about the reality of being a Protestant in Ireland

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Being determinedly partitionist, the initiative allows the Irish to act as neutral bystander with only the British (and, by extension, northern Prods) under scrutiny.

This would be laughable if legacy weren’t so serious an issue.

Are we really to believe that Irish security forces didn’t have multiple agents in at least one of the major paramilitary groups active during the Troubles?

Or, if they did, that their agents were always impeccably behaved? Were rogue cops only a northern thing?

And then there’s the Republic’s “political offence” exemption law that existed throughout the Troubles. How can this not be considered an important part of the Troubles legacy?

Can anyone seriously argue that it didn’t have a major negative impact on the lives and well-being of people in Northern Ireland or, indeed, that it didn’t help extend the conflict?

Imagine if the old Stormont regime had introduced a similar law that allowed for the murder of members of the Garda, southern security forces, and (for a long time) southern civilians, while claiming the targets as their own citizens [as per the former Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution].

Let’s go back further still. After all, isn’t that what legacy is all about.

It cannot be stressed enough that the affection northern Protestants have held for Britain has always been, at the very least, equalled by their fear of being subsumed into an all-Ireland state.

Hardly surprising, given that for most of its existence, the south was an unabashed theocracy: a Catholic-nationalist state that began with the murders of 13 Irish Protestant men and boys at Dunmanaway.

There followed, over subsequent decades, periodic attacks on Protestant homes, churches, shops, businesses, and places of employment.

Invariably, these were casually excused as “retaliation for attacks on Catholics in the north”.

We in the north know only too painfully well the sole motivation for “retaliatory” attacks on innocents: naked sectarianism.

“Sure, haven’t there been two Protestant presidents of Ireland?” Of course, but that’s as ludicrous as claiming the election of Barack Obama as US President was proof that racism had been vanquished there.

And then there was the Vatican’s Ne Temere decree. Strictly speaking, this was not a law in the south. But it might as well have been, so enthusiastically supported and endorsed was it by politicians and successive Irish governments.

In fact, it did enjoy a measure of legal endorsement in 1950, when an Irish High Court judge cited Article 44 of the constitution, “the special position of the Catholic Church”, in its support. And, on appeal, the Supreme Court upheld the High Court decision.

On numerous occasions, an Irish government representative has rightly apologised to the many Catholic victims of the then all-powerful, wholly unaccountable church.

Yet not once has Ne Temere ever been mentioned, much less an apology issued for the devastating effect it had on the tiny Irish Protestant community.

In 1997, an unnamed Church of Ireland bishop was reported as describing Ne Temere being akin to “society genocide”.

Add to all of this the cold-shouldering of Irish Protestants by many of their neighbours and the sporadic boycotting of Protestant-owned shops and businesses.

In truth, Irish Protestants were widely viewed as barely-Christian, non-Irish interlopers.

No wonder the Irish Protestant comedian and television presenter Graham Norton said that he “felt more of an outsider in Ireland being Protestant than being gay”.

One need only recall societal attitudes to homosexuality during the time Norton was growing up to put this comment into perspective.

The unity of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter? Don’t make me laugh.

Wolfe Tone must have been spinning in his grave at the many charlatans who turned up at Bodenstown every year to lay claim to his and the United Irishmen’s legacy.

“But sure, the south has changed out of all recognition.” So has the north, but we’re still (rightly) trawling through its murky past.

We need to address legacy, if we are to have any chance of building the type of New Ireland that many people, including myself, want to see.

But we must do it properly – in an open, honest, island-wide way.

Anything less than that is a self-serving farce, certain to do more harm than good.

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