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These are regular editorials
produced alongside the corresponding issues on Nonviolent
News. |
Also in this editorial
It is one of the ironies of modern history that
someone looking for a safe place to live in the ‘United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ might
today choose the capital of Northern Ireland over the capital
of England (and perhaps even more ironically that the British
government looks set to make some of the same mistakes it
made in Northern Ireland thirty-odd years ago – such
as demonising ‘enemies of the state’). However
a quick glimpse at newspapers in Northern Ireland over the
summer will show that life has not been, and will not be,
transformed by the IRA statement of 28th July that arms should
be dumped:
The loyalist feud (UVF and LVF) continues with
shootings and a few deaths; the UVF literally took over an
East Belfast housing estate to force LVF families out. Polish
immigrants narrowly escaped death in one racist firebomb attack
in Co Derry. Sectarian attacks reported to the police run
at two a day (the actual number probably very much larger)
and are currently very serious in Ballymena. Two pipebombs
exploded at Catholic homes in Co Antrim. Military solution
republicans (so-called ‘dissidents’) attempted
to bomb a Co Armagh police station, sparking a riot. Leading
unionist party the DUP spoke of a two year period to restore
devolved government and possible sanctions it would exercise
if the British government pressed ahead against their wishes.
Meanwhile that IRA statement said that “All
IRA units have been ordered to dump arms”, and, more
importantly “The leadership … has formally ordered
an end to the armed campaign.” and volunteers were “instructed
to assist the development of purely political and democratic
programmes through exclusively peaceful means.” The
IRA movement away from armed struggle has been going on for
two and a half decades, since the Hunger Strikes, and dumping
arms is the logical conclusion of that process (and one which
should have come directly after the Good Friday Agreement
of 1998). Whether any weapons will be kept is not that highly
relevant because more can always be purchased if there is
the will and the money. It is not expected that the IRA will
forgo money coming from such operations as diesel laundering
and cigarette smuggling; dump arms they may do but they haven’t
gone away, you know, even if it will be mainly an old comrades’
benevolent association. But there is currently no strong indication
that the loyalist paramilitary forces, raising their money
from extortion and drug smuggling, will disband in response
to the ‘threat’ from the IRA being lifted.
There are two major options as regards optimism
and pessimism in Northern Ireland at the moment. A pessimistic
optimist would say that in the short term there are going
to be considerable problems but that with the eventual restoration
of devolved government at Stormont things will settle down
and slowly the issues that have bedevilled Northern Ireland
will either be dealt with, forgotten, or put aside. An optimistic
pessimist might say that while some things are making, and
will make, progress, nothing has fundamentally altered the
nature of sectarianism and despite political progress the
reality of division has not changed one iota; the negative
forces live to fight another day while people presently muddle
through. Things will eventually ‘settle down’
– whatever that means - but the forces of sectarianism,
racism and paramilitarism live on – though the ball
is still in play and it is actually quite early in the match.
If the IRA statement of July is acted upon,
which we must presume it will and very shortly, then it will
become increasingly difficult for unionists to oppose Sinn
Féin involvement in government at Stormont. But in
the timeframe to which the DUP are adhering – talking
of a couple of years which might mean a year or two –
much can happen. If Stormont takes off again then the chances
are it will stick; but that certainly does not mean that Northern
Ireland is out of being lost in the woods.
There are, unfortunately, many issues remaining
to be dealt with in Northern Ireland of which the newspaper
references above only indicate some. The sense of powerlessness
experienced in both communities, Catholic/nationalist, and
Protestant/unionist, but particularly the latter, is an indication
that all is not well. This is where the concept of nonviolence
and nonviolent struggle could come in and where there could
be a synthesis with a community action, community relations
and political (with a very small ‘p’) agenda;
bringing this about is another day’s work.
[A version of this editorial appears as
an article in the September issues of ‘Peace News’]
If there were those who still thought of global warming as
being ‘in the future’, Hurricane Katrina and its
effect on New Orleans and the Gulf coast of the southern USA
should be the last of a series of alarm calls. It was itself
a ‘natural’ phenomenon, but as hurricanes take
their power from the heat of the sea, and the sea in the Gulf
of Mexico was not only a couple of degrees warmer than ‘normal’
on the surface but also warmer underneath the surface, the
effect was greatly exacerbated. Global warming can no longer
be thought of as a hypothetical construct; it is a current
reality leading to death and destruction on an alarming scale.
But the effect of the hurricane was greatly
increased by human actions and inactions apart from the output
of greenhouse gases. The reality of divisions in the most
powerful country in the world meant that the elderly and poor
were left to suffer the consequences; a poor country like
Cuba can move a million people out of the eye of a storm but
not the USA. And the money which could have strengthened flood
defences went elsewhere – to such projects as tax cuts
for the rich and the war in Iraq. Nor did the USA have an
adequate plan for mopping up and saving lives afterwards.
For those enamoured with the USA’s social and political
system, the image must have become somewhat tarnished. It
was a tragic and brutal irony that some of the poor and black
people of the USA, whose president is the chief denier of
global warming, should have suffered so much from its effects.
Some of the states within the USA are moving
ahead on Kyoto-type reductions, and not waiting for a White
House which has had its head buried in Iraqi sand (and oil).
But even Kyoto is very limited and a much more radical approach
is needed to issues of climate change. Let us hope that more
‘New Orleans’ are not necessary before world leaders
press ahead with the radical changes needed.
Larry Speight brings us his monthly
column:
“The pilgrim circles the cairn three times, praying,
and then, placing his back to the stone, makes a declaration
renouncing the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.”
(Station 9: Glenncholmcille, by Michael Herity, 2005, CRM
Design & Print Ltd, Dublin)
Turas are common in Ireland, taking placed
every year. In Gleanncholmcille the Turas takes place on the
9 August, and on Croagh Patrick on the last Saturday of July.
People, however, can undertake them any time they wish. A
Tura is a set walk, or pilgrimage, called in Irish ‘an
Turas’, literally ‘the Journey’. Although
carried out by devote Catholics, they have, as I found out
from a recent Turas in Gleanncholmcille primordial origins,
sharing in common with all religions the impulse to find meaning,
connection and communion with ecology and the cosmos. The
Turas rituals in Gleanncholmcille illustrate this. The Turas
is done following the course of the sun – the ultimate
giver of life and the subject of worship in many ancient religions.
Pilgrims are asked to drink water from “a holy well’,
spitting three drops unto the ground, walk in circles around
stone circles, three times on each occasion, encircle healing
stones around the body, lie and roll over on a length of stone,
make a wish while standing on a chair-shaped stone facing
the West, recite prayers, renounce the World and carry three
stones to a cairn high on a hillside. In the case of the latter,
the cairn is Station 7, Colum-Chile’s Well, at which
people have made innumerable offerings, some in the form of
small statues and rosary beads. Other offerings include cups,
coins, shells and stones, which are traditional forms of payment,
perhaps signifying that we are part of a web of connections,
a social, spiritual, physical ecology. Renouncing the World
can be interpreted as intent to live a life of simplicity
and generosity. The Turas is a circular route, marked by inscribed
standing stones, usually a cross of some form, representing
in the pre-Christian world, the four corners of the Earth
as well as the four primary elements. The predominance of
circles strongly suggests that our distant ancestors well
understood the defining feature of life, as in the passage
of time, the recycling of embodied energy, transience. It
is my view that Christianity has, as it has done with other
pre-Christian beliefs and rituals, imposed its theology on
Turases, vis-à-vis the prayers, in order to exercise
control over peoples’ personal effort to find meaning,
a sense of their place in the cosmos. However, the Turas,
as its Irish translation implies, is a journey whose purpose
is to understand or become enlightened, of which there other
forms in different cultures as in the Vision Quest undertaken
by the Plains Indian People, or mediation as practiced by
Buddhists.
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