I’m often asked what I mean by reconciliation. Well, what it doesn’t mean, and can’t be allowed to become, is a precondition for a border poll. That would run totally counter to not only the Good Friday Agreement but democracy itself.
I envisage a genuinely reconciled society as being peaceful, settled, and wholly at ease with itself and all of its component parts.
A society where a person would be judged not on skin colour, ethnicity, religion, politics, sexuality, gender, disability or any other surface difference(s), but solely on their character.
I recognise it will be a long, arduous, sometimes painful journey if we are ever to achieve that goal. And we should understand that, in one respect at least, the journey should never end. To adapt something once said about democracy: Reconciliation is a tender plant that we must nurture constantly, and forever be on our guard against those who would seek to destroy it.
Do I believe that everyone can be convinced to support and pursue this vision? Not at all. Too many people have too much to lose if our society is reconciled. This includes many (but far from all) of our politicians, perpetually-angry commentators, and self-styled ‘influencers’.
Let me deviate for a moment. I lost my admiration for Noam Chomsky when, in a 2015 Harvard Lecture, he publicly endorsed Russia’s military intervention in Syria in support of the murderous Assad regime. He went on to describe the entire Syrian opposition as being linked to ISIS or al-Qaeda.
I knew, from long-term on-the-ground experience, that Chomsky’s claim was outrageously wrong. Still, Chomsky was far from wrong about everything. I particularly like the following, as it chimes with our own situation [I’ve replaced a reference to Henry Kissinger with “they”]: “Speaking truth to power makes no sense. They know it already. Instead, speak truth to the powerless. Or better still, WITH the powerless.”
In other words, try to impress upon the powerless how they are being constantly exploited by the powerful. Ours is not just a divided society, but a badly damaged, wholly abnormal one, and many of the powerful here appear determined to keep it that way.
Just a few obvious examples of this. Twenty-six years after the Good Friday Agreement countless numbers of our people are still living in single-identity areas. Something that our political leaders have never even attempted to address.
It’s the same with segregated education. Virtually all of NI’s children are still being taught in single-identity schools. A mere 7% of schools are integrated, catering to only 8% of our pupils. (Teachers are even trained separately, depending upon their religion.) Yet a 2023 LucidTalk opinion poll found that 66% of NI parents would like their children to attend an integrated school.
And consider how appallingly badly victims have been treated. When not being totally ignored, which is most of the time, they are patronised, weaponised, or used for the occasional photo-op/box-ticking exercise. Victims have been packaged as “ours” and “theirs” depending upon the identity of the victim(s) and/or the perpetrator(s), when in reality every victim is “OURS”.
Tellingly, the 2009 Eames-Bradley extensive report on addressing the issue of victims was almost immediately binned by our politicians on the weakest of pretexts. When a post-conflict population is as physically divided along religious and political grounds as ours; has for decades been exposed to negative stereotyping of “the other” (stereotyping often “confirmed” by media-platformed hate-mongers); and never had the opportunity to get to get to know their opposite numbers as ordinary, everyday people, they are ripe for exploitation.
And the opportunity has not been missed by some politicians and various others, who make a point of keeping tensions alive. Why do so many of our politicians oppose reconciliation? Because they fear it. They fear the uncertainty it would bring.
Try to imagine a NI society where irrational fear, hatred and lack of knowledge of “the other” had been all but eradicated. A society that was largely immune to the hate-mongers. There would be no telling who, or what, people might vote for. And that’s precisely what certain politicians fear. Their power and position depend upon keeping people predictable, and that means keeping them divided.
How do we advance reconciliation? By first recognising that we are being exploited, and by whom and for what purpose.
And, of course, by no longer allowing ourselves to be exploited. By doing everything possible to meet with and get to know people from “the other side”. By supporting and helping those brave groups and individuals who have been working for many years on reconciliation - their efforts regularly undermined by power-seeking exploiters.
We are enjoying a period of calm. But the history of here, and indeed Ireland as a whole, should teach us the dangers of being complacent. How many times in the past, during a period of calm, must people have thought, “It could never happen again?” Yet it always did happen again, because major issues were left unresolved.
Reconciliation is our major issue. We simply can’t afford to leave it unresolved.