Protestants' silence in South feeds Fr Reid's Nazi fantasy

Eoghan Harris - Sunday Independent 16 October

LAST Thursday, I went on The Last Word to talk to Matt Cooper about the remarks made by the Redemptorist priest Fr Alec Reid at the Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in Belfast. Up until that time, I was depending on press reports which had played up Fr Reid's comparison of the unionist community to the Nazis. But Today FM played the actual tape which allowed me to put the affair in context - and to spread the blame more widely.

The tape showed that Fr Reid did not deliver a carefully prepared polemic. He started by saying that unionists had persecuted Catholics for 60 years. After some reaction from the audience, he said they had treated nationalists "almost like animals". He then backtracked a bit under pressure from human rights activist Willie Frazer (who has suffered from Provo violence in South Armagh) and said that the Protestant community had not treated nationalists like human beings.

But as the argument with Willie Frazer escalated, Fr Reid's responses became more extreme. He said that the unionists had treated nationalists the same way as the Nazis had treated the Jews, and that the Protestant community should be ashamed of its record. The performance did nothing to enhance his credibility as an impartial witness to decommissioning.

Fr Reid has apologised for his remarks. That still leaves us with some lethal questions.

* * *

First, is there even a tiny grain of truth in what Fr Reid had to say? None whatsoever, even leaving the Holocaust out of the historical record. In September 1935, the Nazi state brought in the Nuremberg Laws, one of which, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, prevented marriage between Jews and non-Jews. There was no such ban in Northern Ireland: mixed marriages took place all the time.

Likewise, the Northern state did not pass a "Reich Citizenship Law" removing Roman Catholics' right to vote - otherwise people like Gerry Fitt could not have been elected to Westminster.

In Germany in 1936, Jews were removed from the professions like law, education, medicine. By contrast the Northern nationalist community is top heavy with solicitors, teachers and doctors. In 1938, Aryan doctors were banned from treating Jews. No Northern Protestant doctor was banned from treating Roman Catholics - the notion would never have occurred to even the most obdurate unionist.

In August 1938, every German Jewish male had to call himself Israel and every Jewish woman had to call herself Sarah. Northern Ireland passed no law forcing Sean and Brigid to call themselves William or Daphne. Northern Catholics were not forbidden to sit in public parks and use public lavatories - nor were 20,000 sent to a Dachau-style concentration camp from which few emerged alive. Their businesses were not forcibly sold to Northern Protestants. Finally, Northern Roman Catholics were not subjected to a Final Solution, and sent to extermination camps as part of a systematic plan to eliminate them from the entire island of Ireland.

Fr Reid was talking rubbish. Far from being treated like either animals or German Jews, Northern nationalists enjoyed enviable access to the British welfare state, including free health and higher education. Indeed, it was the entry of people like Bernadette McAliskey into QUB, and the growing strength of the Roman Catholic middle class (solicitors, doctors and poet laureates like Seamus Heaney) which fuelled the civil rights movement - which by 1973 had won almost all its demands.

The Provo campaign was not about removing restrictions on Roman Catholics. It was a fascist campaign to force Northern Protestants into a united Ireland. The nearest thing Northern Ireland ever had to Nazis was the Provisional IRA.

* * *

Against that general background, Matt Cooper's first question to me went to the heart of the matter. Did Fr Reid's remarks reveal the deep division between the two communities in Northern Ireland? My answer was that it was much more revealing of the attitude of Southern Irish nationalists.

Fr Alec Reid is not from South Armagh. He is a Southerner. Now of course it is possible he simply went native and picked up his prejudices from Northern nationalists. But fair is fair. Not only have I never heard Northern nationalists sound off like Fr Reid in recent years, but I must admit I have seldom heard a Sinn Fein spokesperson speak in such tribal terms.

In sum, I believe Fr Reid, like those Southerners who texted the programme supporting him, suffers from the deepest delusion in modern Irish history - that the South was a nice cosy house for Southern Protestants. And as I told Matt Cooper, the main purveyors of this myth are Southern Protestant spokespersons.

Any attempt to highlight what happened to Protestants in the South between 1911 and 1980 - a period taking in the Ne Temere ban on "mixed marriages", the ethnic cleansing of 50,000 farmers, shopkeepers and artisans in 1921, the boycott of Fethard on Sea in the Fifties, and the sectarian contraception and divorce laws only recently reformed - will be instantly followed by Southern Protestants popping up in print, radio or television to profess themselves completely happy in the Irish Republic.

* * *

But professing happiness with the present Republic is to miss the point. We are not speaking about current discrimination - I don't know any Protestant in the Irish Republic who is suffering from discrimination at the present time, so there is no point in them telling me how happy they are. We are speaking about the historical memory of marginalisation in modern Irish history - because I don't know any Southern Protestant whose father or mother could have felt they were fully integrated into an Irish state run on Catholic lines.

So why are so few Southern Protestants willing to stand up and say publicly what many of them still say privately: that the Irish state until recently was a pretty cold house for Protestants - just as Northern Ireland was a cold house for Roman Catholics? Why don't Southern Protestants put their family and historical memories on the public record so that Southern Roman Catholics can see that both communities, North and South, share some of the blame?

In reply, my Protestant friends say either that it is easier to keep the head down, or, less honestly, tell me they are doing it for the "peace process". The first reason is honest, the second is hypocrisy. Far from promoting peace, it is precisely this policy of self-imposed silence on the part of Southern Protestants which allows Southern Roman Catholics to suffer from delusions of do-goodery, and to send righteous texts to The Last Word in support of Fr Reid.

Southern Protestants who subscribe to silence may find it lubricates their social life. But they should stop pretending it serves peace. Facing the fact that 50,000 Protestants farmers and artisans were forced out of the South in 1921-22 is a vital part of the peace process. Because it means that both societies have to shoulder blame. Silence feeds the kind of false history that lay behind Fr Reid's outburst. Southern Protestants should speak out and shame the devil.

As the Bible says: the truth sets you free.

Eoghan Harris