November 4 1974
November is traditionally the month of the year when we think especially upon the dead. In Northern Ireland it could be said, sadly, that we think of the dead every month, every week, every day. But as it is November it is perhaps a particularly suitable time for giving some additional thought to the more than ten hundred souls who have met a violent death as a direct outcome of the abominable situation here.
About two years ago, at Christmas, Radio Eireann presented a programme which froze the blood. It was simple but appalling. It consisted only in a number of voices reading out the names of all – between seven and eight hundred at the time – who had lost their lives in the violence of Northern Ireland. No one who heard that programme, who listened to the familiar names, names which brought a remembered, perhaps a beloved face of a well-known public figure or simply a face unknown but recalled from a newspaper photograph, is ever likely to forget it.
Is there anyone here now who would honestly claim that that terrible toll has brought them something they deeply desire?
All over these islands, all over France and Belgium, all over Europe, there are memorials, a few grandiose, most very simple, village crosses, stained glass windows, rolls of honour in parish churches or local halls bearing the names of those who lost their lives in the 1914-18 or the 1939-45 wars. No one would wish to lessen the terrible sacrifice exacted from these men, and women, but there are few today who believe that those holocausts could not have been avoided, or that any lasting benefit was gained from slaughtering two generations.
To return from the general to the particular application of the lesson, it may again, be asked whether violence has ever solved the long drawn out problem of Ireland? And again, the answer must surely be the same. There can hardly be a modern Englishman who believes that Anglo-Irish history is anything but a disaster. The violence in this country has produced only one consistent effect: the effect of the boomerang. And at the close of every boomerang situation people have had to sit down together and talk.
Irish News editorial admonishing the violence that had, by then, cost over 1,000 lives, which, as has been shown throughout history, brings no benefits to anyone.
