>From MCELROY@zodiac.rutgers.edu Sun May  2 19:43:42 1993

                        Ireland's Troubled Sleep
                            by Andrew O'Hehir
                      New York Times Op-Ed Section
                              April 5, 1993
                                  *****


20,000 people thronged central Dublin two Sundays ago calling on the Irish
Republican Army to 'Stop the Bloody Murder.' They congregated in silence to
hear Sinead O'Connor, the pop star who tore up a photo of the Pope on
'Saturday Night Live', sing the Roman Catholic hymn, "Make Me a Channel of
Your Peace." The rally made for compelling drama on TV news and on the front
pages of American papers. But like many Irish-Americans, I was ambivalent.
The media's fixation on the event reinforced misguided conventional wisdom
about the Irish conflict.

The rally represented a repudiation of the shadowy organization that claims to
represent the Irish soul, that proclaims its legacy of bloodshed and martyrdom
to be entwined with the deepest Irish sense of self.

But the I.R.A's claim, I'm afraid, is not easily dismissed. The group is best
understood as the product of two forces: centuries of British colonial
oppression and Irish denial of the meaning of the experience.

Respectable Irish opinion has long opposed the I.R.A campaign of violence
aimed at ending British rule in Northern Ireland. However, the relationship
between the Irish and the I.R.A. is a complicated psychological transaction that
can't be addressed by speeches or captured in opinion polls. Many who oppose
I.R.A. terrorism privately admit to half-buried feelings of anti-British
resentment and to a grudging admiration for the group's resolute defiance.

In this light, the guerrillas' brutal acts can be seen as the stirrings of a dark
medieval unconsciousness behind the facade of contemporary respectability. As
long as Ireland refuses to confront the post-colonial trauma that distorts
virtually all aspects of its social, cultural and political life, this dysfunctional
pattern is unlikely to end. The country's head-long rush to "modernize" has
largely been an effort to replace its past with the anesthetic sameness of
European capitalism. History, to misquote Joyce, is the nightmare from which
Ireland is pretending to awaken.

In the American media's presentation, the rally bore none of this agonized
complexity. Instead, the rally and the bomb attack that killed two English
children last month have been used to support a particular political view of the
conflict: Those who oppose British rule are fanatics rejected by their own
people. And British policy in Northern Ireland in inherently reasonable.

For years, this has been the general tone of American newspaper editorials and
foreign policy, which has adhered to an uncritical special relationship with
Britain. Appropriate noises are often made about ending anti-Catholic
discrimination in Northern Ireland, but evidence of British injustice and human
rights violations are treated as anomalies, never as symptoms of widespread and
systematic abuse. Protests in Dublin in repose to killings of unarmed I.R.A.
suspects by British forces, for instance, haven't made the front pages of U.S.
newspapers.

The media's bias stems more from ignorance and hazy Anglophobia than from
conspiratorial intent. The result is nonetheless to promote an agenda that has
less to do with furthering peace in Northern Ireland than with salving wounded
British pride.

Rational British policy would dictate jettisoning Northern Ireland. But nations
rarely act on a rational basis alone. Perhaps abandoning the final lump of
empire is too bitter a pill for the British Establishment to follow. Instead,
Britain attempts to keep violence at "acceptable" limits and presides over a
"peace process" in which the principal antagonist---the I.R.A.--is not invited.
When such peace talks inevitably fail, Britain throws up its hands and hints at
the ancient notion that the Irish cannot govern themselves. This perennial
impasse has motivated the I.R.A.--never known for its strategic thinking--to
launch a counterproductive campaign on the mainland, which has only stiffened
British resolve to stay the course, undefinable though that may be.

Irish indignation at I.R.A. atrocities is heartfelt. And Ireland must face its
history of violence and victimhood if Catholic-Protestant peace is ever to be
possible. But that process must not obscure a central fact: British policy
created and feeds the cycle of hatred and killing in which the Irish and British
remain trapped.

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