Trevor Ringland and those murdering republicans

Trevor Ringland is a likeable man. Handsome, soft-spoken, a former Ireland rugby player. He is also, in my experience, a man with  seriously deformed thinking about our Troubles and nationalism in general. I remember sharing a BBC radio panel with him once, when the GAA was under discussion. I asked Trevor if the GAA were to abandon the flying of the tricolour and the singing of the national anthem before games, would that encourage unionists to play and attend GAA games? “It’d be a start” was his reply. A constipated response to a generous proposal.

Today, Trevor has an article in The Irish Times,in which he claims that the IRA campaign during the Troubles was about driving people like him ‘into the sea’.  Trevor argues that the IRA campaign had nothing to do with our present position of power-sharing. He concedes that loyalists and ‘security forces (his father was a senior figure in the RUC) on occasion were guilty of ‘wrong’ actions, especially in the early days of the Troubles; but he argues that there was no need for the violence of the IRA.

“The vast majority of the people of Northern Ireland refused to go where the extremes wished to take us, no matter how others seek to rewrite the history now.”

Trevor is right about the ‘vast majority’ who did not engage in violence, whether through principle or fear of being killed. But the IRA campaign lasted thirty years. Without the active or passive support of the community it came from,  the IRA wouldn’t have lasted thirty days, let alone thirty years.  

The changes in the demographics of NEI, with the unionist population shrinking alarmingly, Trevor dismisses as something that will keep people in NEI divided and ‘in their trenches’.

“The current constitutional model on the island of ‘separate but together’ is working”, Trevor insists.

So would we have had power-sharing and the Good Friday Agreement if there hadn’t been political violence? Can you see David Trimble, let alone Ian Paisley, sitting as an equal alongside Martin McGuinness, in response to polite requests to do so?

Trevor concedes deficiencies in NEI  in the first fifty years of its existence. He even concedes that there was loyalist violence, but does a body-swerve when it comes to the RUC, the UDR and the British army.  I can see it may be difficult for him to accept, but when citizens are beaten off the streets for peacefully seeking their civil rights, when they are shot dead by the British army, when  collusion between ‘security’ forces and loyalist paramilitaries repeatedly occur, the emergence of the IRA seems inevitable.

It’s not republicans who are intent on altering the past to justify their actions. It’s columnists like Trevor who are determined that Irish people will see the Troubles as the responsibility of republicans, and that Irish people embrace his version of our history.

But hey, The Irish Times does what The Irish Times has always done, making sure that such as Trevor get to remind the population what a blood-crazed mob republicans were back then. There’s an election on the Southern horizon, stupid. Stand by for more of the same.