History as Plague: Two Irelands Struggle to Recover : History: Ireland--and Britain--too long relied on 19th-Century institutions and a sense of history. Justice has not been served.

WASHINGTON —  Easter weekend in Ireland was sufficiently full of the sad symbols of that divided island to provoke the usual sighs. In the North, there were the funerals of three Catholics, victims of the latest sectarian murders. These were ostensibly carried out in reprisal for the shooting, a few weeks earlier, of a Protestant policeman’s widow. In Dublin, the Republic’s capital, the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 was marked by parades and speeches. And, as usual, no comment on them was possible without a quotation from William Butler Yeats--usually his sense that after the rebellion all was “changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.”

Yet from afar--and even though hopes have been raised many times before, only to be dashed on the rocks of obduracy and fear--it looked as if something had changed this year. In Northern Ireland, the leaders of all the political parties save for Sinn Fein--the political wing of the Irish Republican Army--had agreed to take part in talks designed to lead to power sharing between the majority Protestant and minority Catholic communities. In Dublin, the Easter celebrations were markedly subdued, not triumphant. It was as if the Republic’s leaders, led by Mary Robinson, its new, charismatic president, had decided that appeals to a glorious history were of little help in forging a livable future for the island’s two communities.

Let’s hope so. If any place in the world can be said to suffer from the effects of too much history, it is Ireland. In the North, Protestants march each July to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne, when Protestant King William III defeated the army of Catholic James II. The battle took place in 1690.

In the South, as in Irish expatriate bars around the world, not just the Easter Rebellion is celebrated as if it had happened yesterday, but every British slight and Irish act of heroism since Oliver Cromwell sacked Drogheda--less than three decades after the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock.

Myth and tradition are grand things. They can provide a sort of social glue for a nation. But in Ireland, for 300 years, each community’s myth and tradition has been defined in terms of opposition to the other. In Ireland, history does not bring Catholic and Protestant, North and South, Scottish and Irish stock together--it serves to remind each community of what keeps them apart.

The casualties of the abiding sense of history are numberless. Since the last episode of the Troubles started in Northern Ireland 22 years ago, thousands have died in sectarian violence. The only sensible test of any political initiative--by British politicians or Irish--is whether it reduces that violence. Everything else is secondary.

Yet, for some, one of the secondary reasons for praying for an end to history in Ireland, and a reconciliation of the island’s two communities, is nonetheless important. For Ireland’s divisions, especially as manifested in the Troubles in the North, have done terrible things to the reputation of British justice. In March, six men were set free after more than 16 years in British prisons for murders they did not commit. These men are the Birmingham Six, named after the city where IRA bombings killed more than 20 people--the crime for which they were wrongly convicted. They now join others who can testify that the scales of British justice are not always fairly balanced. In 1989, three men and a woman--the Guildford Four, named after another site of IRA atrocities--were freed after 14 years of another wrongful sentence.

In both cases, everything was done by the book. Juries found the defendants guilty; courts of appeal reviewed the convictions; successive home secretaries had looked at the cases and let them stand. Yet still a great injustice was done.

The book of British justice was not good enough. Once the police fabricated evidence--as they did in both cases--a terrible snowball started rolling: The juries would not disbelieve the police; the appeal-court judges would not meddle with a jury verdict; the home secretaries would not second-guess the appeal-court judges. Over both sorry affairs hung the palpable feeling that, faced with terrorist threats, civil liberties take a back seat.

Britain now hums, just as it did after the Guildford Four were released, with plans to change the criminal justice system so that such injustices will not happen again. But a tweak here or there is not all that will be required. In the length of time it took to reverse the Guildford and Birmingham cases, in the amount of effort it took from an honorable roll-call of journalists, retired judges and Cardinal Basil Hume to get the 10 free, Britain comes face-to-face with an awkward truth.

That truth is that Britain, too, is trapped by its history. Of all the rich countries, only the United States has a form of government older than Britain’s. (Dating Britain’s modern form of government from the Reform Act of 1832.) Most European countries have had great ruptures in their modern history--defeats in wars, occupations, revolutions, regicide. Britain has not--which means its government institutions are much as they were in the early 19th Century.

At that time, it was possible to argue a “sovereign” parliament, made up of men with an independent cast of mind, unconstrained by party whips or the search for office, was a bulwark of liberty. Now it is not. Parliament’s main role is to provide a permanent body of support for the government of the day, no more than that.

Lacking a Supreme Court, or any constitution against which the actions of government can be measured against timeless principle, Britain lacks the institutions that give formal underpinning to a commitment to civil liberties. And so--as in the Birmingham and Guildford cases--those liberties too often go by default.

In an ideal world, Britain would give itself a Bill of Rights; not because such a document would be a panacea, but because it would breathe life into a culture of liberty, of rights against the state. And if such a culture were to come into being, the long, uphill struggle to prove the innocence of those imprisoned after Birmingham and Guildford would not have been attended with the suspicion that it was, in fact, greeted with by the powers-that-be.

A Bill of Rights is a long way off. Still, there are signs of change. Increasingly, the European Convention on Human Rights, a 40-year old treaty, is turned to by those who wish to challenge British justice. The European Commission and Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg are increasingly the arenas where the actions of British governments are tested against general principles.

If, as may be the case, the wholehearted identification of Britain--and, for that matter of Ireland too--with a European destiny is happening, this grafting on of constitutionalism is likely to be one of its most important consequences. It will not bring about a reconciliation of the two traditions in Ireland--other initiatives must do that--but it will ameliorate at least one of the ways in which the divisions in Ireland have been so disastrous for Britain itself.