Father Brendan Hoban and some Bullbrit

As a practising Catholic I try to pay attention to public utterances by the clergy of the Catholic Church. So when Father Brendan Hoban published a column in The Western People I made a point of reading it.

It’s titled ‘Sorry is still the hardest word for Sinn Féin’, No smudged on-the-one-hand-on-the-other here. For Father Brendan, Michelle O’Neill made “an almost royal descent down the famous staircase of Stormont in regulation high heels. But in effect very little has changed at all.”

I suspect thousands of Northern unionists would beg to disagree with his diagnosis. For decades unionist politicians urged their followers to vote for them, because otherwise the North would end up with a republican First Minister. They’re now uncomfortably aware that precisely that has happened.

Fr Brendan goes on to dismiss any talk by Michelle  of “serving everyone equally” as clichés and guff. What’s more, she ”lapsed into defence mode” when asked about the conflict in the North. She said she thought it was justified.  Fr Brendan, on the other hand, saw the violence as “a 30 year-long campaign of indiscriminate murder”. I’m guessing Fr Brendan is referring to the IRA and  not murders by state forces during that period .

Slow though I’d be to correct a man of the cloth, I feel compelled to remind Fr Brendan that  the record shows how IRA violence, grim though it was,  was not one of indiscriminate murder. You only have to look at the history of the period to see that for many republicans, events catapulted them  into situations they’d gladly have avoided. The civil rights marchers were beaten off the streets, Bloody Sunday changed beatings to slaughter, dozens of innocent Catholic people were systematically killed by the Glenanne gang which worked hand in glove with British agents – which is why the British government is so anxious to pass the Legacy Act that will make it impossible to expose the degree to which the British forces were involved in the deaths of ordinary decent Catholic people.

Exactly a month before Fr Brendan’s column in The Western People, Michelle O’Neill said at Stormont “We must never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families .I am sorry for all the lives lost during the conflict. Without exception.”

Nor is she the first Sinn Féin leader to have expressed regret at the many lost lives. Perhaps if Fr Brendan was less intent on pooh-poohing the change in a northern state built on sectarianism and discrimination, into a state where a republican is First Minister, he’d drop the lie – it’s a sin to tell a lie, Fr B – that the North’s Troubles were created by a blood-thirsty group of madmen who, for no good reason, slaughtered “indiscriminately” for thirty years and then, bafflingly, stopped.  All the while the decent British forces did what they could to restrain them.

The late John Bruton, former leader of Fine Gael, believed that the Easter Rising would have been better not to have happened. Most historians attribute the War of Independence to the ghastly execution of the leaders of the Rising. Here’s a suggestion,  Fr Brendan: if you think  as distinct from sloganise about the North in the final decades of the twentieth century, you mey see some telling parallels.

Before it was blown up by the IRA in 1966, a column in Dublin’s O’Connell Street supported a one-eyed English adulterer called Nelson. I suggest Fr Brendan rethinks his one-eyed view of the North, past and present. If he gives me his address, I’ll buy and post him copies of Ten Men Dead and Lethal Allies. I’ll even send him my own book, Whose Past Is It Anyway? No charge. You’ll really find them eye-openers, Fr Brendan.