“We cannot predict what Protestants and Catholics will be fighting about in a hundred years from now. Only that, on past form, they will be fighting about something.”
The first thing that would strike a time-traveller from the 1970s is how secular the protests in Belfast, Northern Ireland are; suggesting that what is still with us is just division – and that division survives both political reform and huge cultural change.
Two books written in the early stages of the current troubles articulate the persistent issues. One was Andrew Boyd’s Holy War in Belfast, which culled old News Letter reports to describe the sectarian rioting in the city in the 1880s. One of the irritants then was the use of Scottish Army regiments against Catholic rioters.
The other book was ATQ Stewart’s classic The Narrow Ground. Stewart asked a simple question: how did the riots of the 20th century in Belfast come to be so similar to the riots of the 19th? He said that the eruption of rioting was like the past itself crashing up through the cobbles and history repeating itself.
Is it true that history itself is a player; that the unfinished business of the past is the problem? Surely one problem with that theory – axiomatic as it seems to be – is that most people know very little history.
Consider the Source
