A Place That Is Irish and British

If the “complete end” of violence announced by the Irish Republican Army continues for three months, then Sinn Fein, the political counterpart of the IRA, will be welcome to join talks on the future of Northern Ireland, according to a commitment made last year by Prime Minister John Major of Britain and Prime Minister Albert Reynolds of Ireland. But what, some might ask, will there be to talk about? Once the principle of majority rule has been accepted and violence has been rejected, what remains on the table?

What remains is the slow business of exchanging romance for reality. What did “Brits Out of Northern Ireland!” really mean? That Britain’s soldiers should leave the region? No, at the level of mythology, it meant that all who announced and insisted that they were British--all whose ancestors came as conquerors--should vanish.

What history has made further history can sometimes unmake. If this were not so, Ireland as a whole would now be a part of the United Kingdom.

Past a painfully elusive point, however, what history has made cannot be unmade. Against all expectations, the IRA seems to have stopped trying to unmake a history that refused to be unmade.

In romance and mythology the unionist camp--those who wish continued union with Britain--has matched the Irish nationalist camp only too well. The unionist slogan, “No Surrender,” has included an irrational wish that, in effect, the vanquished aboriginal Irish should vanish beyond the pale.

The ultimate acting out of such a mythic erasure is ethnic cleansing, a practice the 17th Century knew only too well and the 20th Century has lately been rediscovering. But when mythic erasure is renounced, what must replace it--nothing else can--is the homely business of building a life with other real people in a real place that all acknowledge belongs to all. This is the work that must now begin.

Northern Ireland’s path will be neither quite Irish nor quite British, but in broad terms the unionists need only look to Britain and the nationalists need only look to Ireland to see where that path leads. British and Irish, Protestants and Catholics, live together in peace in both countries. In time they will do the same in that one corner of the world whose destiny is to be, somehow, Ireland and Britain at once.