On the front lines
The minister of my new church, Rev. Chris Hudson, is very active in the peace process in Northern Ireland, having sat toe to toe with Protestant paramilitary leaders and IRA members over the past decade. As befits his Dublin roots, he is an amazing story teller. I spent part of the day with him and most of the day providing transport for members of the International Association for Religious Freedom (one Iranian muslim, one Israeli rabbi, one Dutch and one American unitarian, and two Pakistani sikhs). They were in town to learn about peace efforts here and I was thrilled to join them to listen to local activists.
I could write a book about what I learned today. Chris feels the animosity around the orange parades is overblown. In his soft Dublin accent, he says: "One thing you'll notice about people here is they'll drive 60 miles to be offended, and the other side will drive 100 miles to give offense."
He talked about how many people in the north have direct experience of the violence. Even a Dublin man such as himself lost friends in a high profile attack. A Dublin band called the Miami Showband, fronted by Chris's friend Fan O'Toole, had played a gig in the north one night in 1975. On the way back to Dublin, the VW van was forced to stop at a British checkpoint. The soldiers were also members of a paramilitary group. They attempted to conceal in the van a bomb that would go off once the band was Dublin bound, thus allowing them to claim the band was an IRA front. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing a paramilitary, whereupon his colleagues opened fire on the band, killing three, wounding two.
Chris learned that one of the killers was a nonsubscribing Presbyterian. Digging deeper, he found that this man's father was killed by the IRA. After an IRA man had been killed decades before, the IRA came to a border town to kill Protestants. Having gotten wind of the plan, all the Protestants in the town had left except for nine nonsubscribing Presbyteriains, who refused to leave because they never took sides in the conflict. The IRA didn't entertain such niceties and shot them.
Thus, the conflict has propagated itself for generations.
Much of the conversation turned on the poor quality of education available to low-income Protestants, resulting in lack of opportunity and increasing the appeal of tribal identity, and all the marching and flag waving that goes with it.