Fr Alec Reid has a real blind spot when it comes to the IRA and the republican leadership — he cannot accept that they lie, that they steal, and that they have been up to their neck in crime. He believes whatever they tell him, he accepts them at their own estimation, he sees the best in them.
This blind spot was demonstrated to me quite two weeks ago when I reminded him of the time when he sat in a room with me and a representative of the IRA’s northern command. We were trying to deal with an attempt by three members of one of the IRA’s main Belfast hit squads to lure me to an ambush, using false names and a pack of lies about a split among released IRA prisoners.
Their aim was to end a series of articles about the inner workings of the IRA. Reid handled the situation with great skill and, on at least one occasion, told the IRA representative that he did not believe him. The representative promptly changed his story. I reminded him that this was evidence of the IRA telling lies. He said he didn’t remember it that clearly. Then, when I pointed out that the IRA had denied carrying out the Birmingham bombing and later admitted it and that Gerry Adams had denied ever being in the IRA, Reid changed the subject.
He didn’t want to know. Instead, he was holding firm to the attitude he needed when he was coaxing the IRA away from violence. To perform that task, it was necessary to take what it said at face value, to take on board its concerns and not to challenge the organisation too strongly. There was no point in winning arguments with the Provos if it lost you influence.
Somewhere along the way, Reid started to view the IRA in the same positive light in which it viewed itself. Perhaps that explains his extraodinary outburst last week in which he likened the Protestant political establishment’s treatment of Catholics during much of Northern Ireland’s history as the equivalent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. It is a caricature that the IRA has used to justify the murder of 1,800 people but it is also a poisonous metaphor. It diminishes the Holocaust and Protestants were sensitised to it because it had been used before by President McAleese.
It is a contemptuous and dehumanising slur. The only significant pogrom against the Jews in Irish history was instigated by the incendiary preaching of a member of his own Redemptorist Order, Fr John Creagh, in Limerick in the early 1900s. During the second world war, the IRA leadership supported Nazi Germany, sought its help and gave the Germans on the ground reports on the success of Luftwaffe bombing raids on Belfast. The chief of staff, Sean Russell, went to Germany for sabotage training and, far from disowning him, Sinn Fein organised a commemoration and unveiled a statue of him earlier this year.
Republicans are not ideally placed to shout Nazi at Willie Frazer of the Protestant victims group FAIR and, in any case, the comparison between discrimination against Catholics and the gassing of Jews in their millions is so grotesque that it is no more than a term of sectarian abuse.
Reid was right to apologise but the problem is that, although he regrets the hurt, he doesn’t challenge the attitude that underpinned his words. He seems unaware that he has caused pain to many people through his “soft spot” for the IRA, his penchant for airbrushing inconvenient evidence from his field of vision or dismissing it as black propaganda.
These are the hallmarks of prejudice and bigotry, and he should now consider the possibility that, despite his selflessness and good intentions, he has allowed himself to become deluded, blind to the repercussions of his words and actions. Take the case of Vera McVeigh whose son Columba was abducted and murdered by the IRA, then secretly buried in Bragan Bog. The perpetrators said nothing for 24 years, leaving her hoping that he had run away to England and would eventually come home.
Shortly after the IRA admitted the murder, Reid rang McVeigh and told her that he had spoken to the man who buried her son and asked her to pray for him as he was “in a bad way”. McVeigh was devastated and cursed him over the phone and who can blame her? It had been an act of stunning insensitivity. She was left feeling that he had more sympathy for the man who buried her murdered son than for her as a bereaved mother.
The same cockeyed morality was on display on BBC’s Heart and Minds programme when Reid described the IRA leadership as free of any taint of crime while condemning Michael McDowell, the minister for justice, for saying the IRA was changing from a heavily armed militia into a lightly armed enforcement unit for a revolutionary group.
“That kind of thing really is in my view quite immoral; that kind of talk because it simply isn’t true,” said Reid who refrained from discussing the IRA in terms of morality or condemnation.
In showing his own prejudices, Reid may in the end have done Northern Ireland a service. He demonstrated that even a good man, a lifelong opponent of violence and proponent of peace, could be blinded by his own unconscious bias.
It is an important part of Ireland’s healing process for the population to recognise that bigotry can afflict even good people who work to save life. It is easy to recognise prejudice in those with whom we disagree, the trick is to see it even in our own most cherished attitudes and in the words of those we love.
Ian Paisley Jr, for instance, who correctly described Reid as having “lost it” in his Nazi slurs, might have remembered his own father’s outbursts. Paisley Sr said, on the death of Pope John XXIII: “This Romish man of sin is now in Hell.” He also led a protest against a Catholic-owned ice-cream parlour on the loyalist Shankill Road and claimed that “the Provisional IRA is the military wing of the Roman Catholic Church”.
Unlike Reid, who regretted his “foolish words” when he saw the hurt and difficulty they had caused, Paisley has never apologised for any of this, any more than he apologised for saying, in 1968, of Catholic property that had been burnt, “Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burnt because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners”.
In the shock expressed by unionists against Reid’s claim that Catholics in Northern Ireland had been treated as animals, there was a deep denial of the systematic injustices suffered by Catholics under unionist rule.
In the 1930s civil service, departments were checked to ensure that not too many Catholics were employed. Sir Basil Brooke, later to become unionist prime minister, told a cheering crowd that he had no Catholics employed on his own estate, warned that “Roman Catholics were trying to get in everywhere” and urged other landowners “wherever possible to employ good Protestant lads and lassies”.
The pattern of discrimination continued until the fall of Stormont and Sir Basil Brooke, later Lord Brookeborough, never doubted that it was justified. As late as October 1968, when the whole edifice of unionist dominance he had built was on the point of collapse because of its inability to reform itself, Brookeborough told The Irish Times that nationalists should be excluded from “higher positions” because “if they got a chance they would drive us into the republic” .
These words and actions were expressions of a deep unionist siege mentality and fear of being overrun. They can be easily understood but are impossible to defend just as it is impossible to defend contemporary attacks on Catholics in north Antrim or the loyalist pickets of Catholic grave-blessing ceremonies in Newtownabbey.
Reid has at least succeeded in bringing these issues into the open and provided a challenge for both Protestants and Catholics to examine the attitudes they hold so deeply that they regard them as “common sense”.
Reid himself argued that, if the roles had been reversed, nationalists may well have behaved in much the same way to unionists as unionists had behaved to them. It was a moment of clarity in a sea of muddled thinking, a recognition that the Northern Ireland problem is not a case of a good community and a bad community but of people conditioned by circumstances.
