Fintan O’Toole is a formidable writer. There’s a vividness and an easy mastery to his sentences; people enjoy reading him. Which makes it all the greater pity that a sizeable chunk of what he writes is one-eyed.
In this morning’s Irish Times he’s saluting the book Lost Lives, which as you know provides information about every single person killed during the period of our Troubles. We don’t need the quotations from it to remember some of the horrors that the Troubles were littered with, but it is still a stark, moving book.
Then Fintan moves into establishing who were the worst actors in the Troubles, and lists them in degrees of culpability: the British state, the loyalist gangs and the IRA. All three, he maintains, want to give young people today a false picture of the Troubles: ‘security forces’ trying to protect British citizens, loyalists attempting to defend ‘Ulster’ by killing Catholics, and the IRA killing more Catholics than loyalists or British forces.
He urges the creation of a truth-for-amnesty forum, where the truth of what happened could be laid out and laid to rest, and in the meantime the mass publication of Lost Lives so we stay aware of the horror of what happened.
This is where Fintan’s vision goes cock-eyed. In the article, he makes it clear that the IRA are most to blame, and that republicans are presenting a simplistic black-and-white version of events to young people. Anyone who grew up in the north-east of Ireland will know that fifty years of discrimination and gerrymander, of contempt for things Irish, of imprisonment without trial had to lead to an explosion point eventually. They will also know, if they’re honest, that what has been achieved politically would almost certainly not have been achieved if it had not been preceded by armed resistance by those who could take subjugation no more. Only when Fintan has digested that massive, jagged north-eastern piece of history can he talk about the Troubles with credibility.
There is one other problem which Fintan and others have when they write about the blood and tears of the second half of the twentieth century in Ireland. While effectively painting the crimson colours of pain and destruction, they ignore the fact that history is packed full of similar pain and destruction, and the existence of an army in just about every country in the world is an admission that, when deemed necessary, there will be more lost lives in the future. As that wonderful song The Green Fields of France tells us, it has happened and will happen again and again and again and again.
Time to open both eyes, Fintan.
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