English and Irish: a way forward through repentance: Peter Riddell reviews a slim book with some big implications. - Where I Sensed the Breath of God: a Footnote in Anglo-Irish History - book review

For A Change, Feb-March, 2003 by Peter Riddell

In the heart of the Falls Road district of West Belfast, Northern Ireland, stands the Redemptorist Monastery of Clonard. It was a source of strength for the local Catholic community during the darkest days of the Troubles in the Seventies and Eighties. It is now clear that it also played a crucial role in subsequent political developments.

During those years a remarkable group of priests and lay people gathered around Clonard. One of them was Father Alex Reid CSsR, who became a confidant of Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein. Fr Reid arranged a series of meetings in Clonard Monastery between Adams and John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), during which the two nationalist parties forged a common approach. Fr Reid then acted as their intermediary with the Dublin government.

In time this led to the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, in which Britain acknowledged the right of the people of Ireland, North and South, to decide freely if they wished to create a united Ireland or not. This in turn laid the foundation for the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement between the two governments and the parties in Northern Ireland, for the creation of a local assembly and a power-sharing executive in the North, and the renunciation by the Republic of its territorial claim to the North.

In a recent book, Where I sensed the breath of God: a footnote in Anglo-Irish history, Dr Roddy Evans brings to light a fascinating story of people who affected, and were affected by, the spirit at work in the Clonard Monastery during those years.

In the late Seventies, one of Fr Reid's colleagues, Fr Christopher McCarthy CSsR, started a weekly Bible study. One day a Protestant woman apologized to him for the way she and her family had behaved towards Catholics. (Her father had been one of those responsible for `gerrymandering'--altering council boundaries to ensure a Unionist majority.) As a result McCarthy invited her and others of the Moral Re-Armament group in Belfast to attend the Bible studies. Evans, Anglo-Irish by origin, was one of them. `Studying the Bible together turned out to be the unusual means of stripping off the polite veneer that members of each community show to each other,' he writes. `The reality of underlying prejudice and hate was exposed in all its ugliness, but ... in a context of understanding and healing.'

Some profound changes of heart occurred. Dr George Dallas, a Presbyterian, is quoted: `I began to think of what repentance must mean for our community in relation to Ireland. Surely it must mean a humble and glad acceptance of ourselves fully as Irish people.... Unless our community learns to care for all the people of Ireland, there will always be violence in this country.' Thinking such as this caught the interest of Nationalists and reinforced those who were arguing that politics should replace armed struggle.

At the same time, in England, Canon (later Bishop) John Austin Baker, then Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey in which he expressed his shame at what England had done to Ireland over the centuries. A strong link developed between Fr McCarthy and Canon Baker, and in 1980 Baker was invited to preach in Clonard, the first Protestant to preach in a Catholic church in Belfast.

Dr Martin Mansergh's foreword is itself evidence of the significance of what is recounted. Now an Irish Senator, Dr Mansergh was special adviser on Northern Ireland to three Irish Prime Ministers. He commends the group, `inspired by the ideals of Moral Re-Armament', for having the courage `to try to come to grips with the moral legacy of history'.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was touching on just this issue recently when he admitted that many of the problems he has to deal with `area consequence of our colonial past'. The controversy that followed shows that we have not yet arrived at a balance between pride and shame at our recent history.

A retired English civil servant, Joan Tapsfield, quoted by Evans, looks at it this way: `If my father ... had died in debt, I should have wanted to repay the debt'.

If we English were to face the cost of the `colonial past' in terms of lost and disrupted lives and livelihoods, we would be impelled to ask the forgiveness of those who have suffered, and seek ways of serving them. It would be both an appropriate response to our past and an inspiring way forward, laying a basis for partnership with some who presently consider us their enemy.

We should also ask ourselves whether we retain any attitudes that in previous times gave rise to brutal actions. Not so long ago I found myself arguing to an Irishman that over the centuries England had no choice but to occupy Ireland to ensure its own security. `What about the security of the Irish?' was all he had to ask to make me shocked at my Anglo-centric view-point!

And what of our relationship with those who were instruments of our domination, the Protestants in Northern Ireland? It was convenient for us that three hundred years ago they were willing to settle in Ireland; now it seems that our convenience dictates that they abandon their British identity and privileged status. It is not surprising that they feel aggrieved. They have served Britain faithfully in peace and in war, and they do not deserve to be cold-shouldered now. They are already facing many changes and need our support in these formative days.