Forgiveness as peace process

National Catholic Reporter, July 16, 1999 by Michael J. Farrell

From N. Ireland to Rwanda to wherever the heart hurts, bold experiment offers hope of healing between individuals and groups

Welcome to Northern Ireland!" announces a leaflet from the tourist office. "Romantic countryside ... an ancient land with a rich historical and cultural tradition and some of the friendliest people anywhere."

"Mother of Two Dies when Pipe-bomb Thrown Through the Window of her Home by Loyalist Extremists," announces a newspaper in early June. Her name was Elizabeth O'Neill. She had lived in that house for 36 years, in a Protestant area a stone's throw from Drumcree, made notorious by loyalist insistence on marching down Catholic streets to celebrate a battle fought in distant 1690. The bomb landed at O'Neill's feet. She grabbed it in desperate hope of throwing it back, but didn't get time.

Violence still stalks the romantic countryside. There and everywhere, people still struggle, after all the thousands of years, for a way to live together. Many who have known both war and peace have not judged peace -- that ambiguous condition -- the best option.

There was peace of sorts in Northern Ireland for much of the century but it was mired in such injustice that some form of revolt by the Catholic minority became inevitable. Now there is talk of peace regained after 30 years of strife, but the Protestant majority is fearful of losing what it long regarded as its heritage.

At one point or another nearly everything has been tried on this complicated little island. The British army came in force. Delegations and peaceniks came from America and elsewhere. Commissions and tribunals were established. Bodies were formed to entice investment from abroad. The talk was of community relations and development, no-nonsense practical approaches in a hardheaded part of the world that had long ago grown cynical about softness.

But now a new sound is heard in Northern Ireland. The word forgiveness.

While it has been part of our vocabulary practically forever, forgiveness has mostly been kept in a tight religious box. Thus, like Chesterton's problem with Christianity, it has not so much been found wanting; it has rather been found difficult and left untried.

The word is being echoed, if only faintly, around the globe. An alien sound in a law-and- order age, most people would say, but it is stirring hope. A world weary of troubles, from brutal national predicaments to quiet family desperation, from East Timor to these United States, seems eager to try fresh solutions.

As May turned into June, Irish police dug frantically in search of bodies disappeared in the early 1970s. The Irish Republican Army handed over one such body and announced there were eight others. The saddest of these cases was Jean McConville, a widow and mother of 10, abducted in front of her screaming children in 1972 and executed because she had cradled in her arms a British soldier fatally wounded on a Belfast street outside her house.

Forgiveness is a tall order in cases like these.

In Drumcree, on the outskirts of Portadown, one angle of what used to be called Ulster's Murder Triangle, all is quiet on Sunday morning as the respectable cars drive up to the local Protestant church. This is one of the last redoubts of the Orange Order, the fraternity founded centuries ago to protect Protestant interests, especially union with Britain. Many say the annual Orange marching mania represents the dying kick of an old order passing. Down those bleak streets, nationalist flags glare from their tall poles at Unionist flags, and visitors are advised not to loiter taking pictures.

Farther north is Coleraine, a few miles from the legendary Giant's Causeway on the rugged northern coast. A polite Protestant little town, it was the focus of major dissension a generation ago when the coveted University of Ulster was located there in preference to Catholic Derry an hour's drive away.

Ed Cairns is a professor of psychology at the university's Centre for the Study of Conflict. A mild-mannered, scholarly type, he grew up outside Belfast, has been at Coleraine since 1972. His initial academic interest was children's problem-solving. But in 1972 nearly 500 people died in the local "troubles," and Cairns couldn't ignore this. Besides, he holds the view that too much emphasis has been placed on the children: "Adults have expected them to do the work the adults themselves were not prepared to do." The parents were saying they couldn't be friends with "the other lot" but encouraged the kids to do so.

The local conflict was not a popular academic area for a psychologist. "People in other disciplines such as history, politics and economics don't think psychology has anything to say to this subject," Cairns told NCR in a postmodern glass corner of the university. The tide is turning, however, and he is now widely involved in ethnopolitical studies, while, outside academia, the IRA and other military groups have declared cease-fires, and the peace process is in the air.

Then Cairns heard the Templeton Foundation was offering grants for studies of the potential role of forgiveness in conflict situations.