Ireland is the next stop on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign itinerary: he arrives there for a day on Wednesday. It’s a country with a fascinating and often tragic history that Modi might find worth remembering and thinking about.
Here’s a four-paragraph summary.
In the 1840s, “an Gorta Mór” (the Great Hunger), often called the Irish Potato Famine, ravaged the island. At the time, many Irish depended largely on potatoes for food. So when a disease, the potato blight, decimated the crop across Europe, Ireland was particularly hard hit. The famine killed a million Irish and another million emigrated; the country’s population fell by nearly a quarter. (Imagine India losing the equivalent of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh).
The Hunger had far-reaching consequences. Largely Catholic Ireland was then part of the overwhelmingly Protestant United Kingdom, already a reason for mistrust and tension. Rightly or wrongly, many Irish saw the response of the British Government to the famine as inadequate at best. (The phrase “genocide by starvation” has been used, even in recent times and contemporary memorials). This strengthened calls on the island for Irish independence. That eventually came about in 1922, with the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
The Treaty established the Irish Free State ‒ which PM Modi will visit. Crucially, the Treaty also allowed six northern, Protestant-dominated counties to opt out of the Irish Free State. Those six counties formed what was and still is called Northern Ireland, which chose to remain part of the United Kingdom.
That Partition ‒ a familiar word for Indians ‒ was to set off another long and tragic chapter of Irish history: what’s commonly referred to as, simply, The Troubles. Protestant-dominated though Northern Ireland is, it is home to a significant Catholic minority. The Protestants saw themselves as British; the Catholics as Irish. That, and the ancient hostility between these two variants of Christianity, caused decades of bitter and brutal violence that killed 3,000 people.
A bitter divide
There are already echoes of my own Indian experience in all this. But I heard some more when, some years ago, I spent some days roaming through ground zero of The Troubles: the Falls Road (Catholic) and Shankill Road (Protestant) areas of Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast.
Several people I met ‒ journalists, academics, taxi-drivers, even the lady who owned my B&B ‒ warned me not to go to Falls and Shankill Roads. Everyone there was on knife-edge, they said, and who could predict how they would react ‒especially to a dark-skinned outsider? Oddly, the only person who told me not to worry was also an Indian: Diljit Rana, one of Northern Ireland’s most prominent businessmen (since elevated to Baron in the House of Lords). Over lunch at the Holiday Inn he owns in Belfast, he smiled and shook his head when I asked if I should anticipate any danger. “Nothing will happen,” he said. “I’ve been in this country for years and there's no real racism.”
But the walkabout was one serious, unnerving, eye-opener. There’s been so much hatred and killing that there’s actually a large wall that separates Falls and Shankill (“How can we have peace when there's reason for a wall?” was one piece of scrawled graffiti on it). Also, all through the many hours I roamed, a police helicopter hovered far above, stationary in the air. And both sides of the wall are dominated by enormous murals: often, an entire side of a building is painted with a man in a black mask, holding a long rifle.
Like the one in Shankill, embellished with a wreath, dedicated to “King Rat, Loyalist Martyr, 1960-1997.” (“Loyalist” referring to the Protestants, loyal to the British Crown.) King Rat was “martyred” in jail, shot to death by Catholic prisoners who managed to smuggle in a gun. He was serving an eight-year sentence for threatening to kill a woman. But he was also suspected of murdering a Protestant woman married to a Catholic, of murdering three Catholics in a shop, and of over a dozen more murders.
Martyr, murderer.
And Falls Road? No less plastered with murals. An especially large one remembers 19-year-old Tom Williams, “killed by the Brits in September 1942”. Tom confessed to the shooting death of a police constable, Patrick Murphy (ironically, himself a Catholic). He was executed. A priest who watched the hanging, Father Alexis, said: “At this moment Tom is a saint in heaven.”
Saint, murderer.
Bring it together again
Yet with all that to see in Belfast, my most abiding memory is of reconciliation. The 1998 “Good Friday Agreement” has brought some degree of peace to this long-Troubled land: hostility remains, but at least the two sides are now engaging in the political process instead of violence. But even more encouraging are various citizens’ groups that work on mediation and reconciliation, exploring ways Catholics and Protestants can live side-by-side.
Just one example: purely by chance, I was invited to attend a workshop for police officers from all over Northern Ireland, conducted by Mediation Network for Northern Ireland. The organisations director, Brendon McAllister, warned me that there were security issues involved in this meeting, and thus I must not reveal where it was held, nor name anyone who attended.
At the session, I learned that the Troubles have left about twice as many Catholics dead as Protestants. Only 4%of Protestant deaths have been due to British and Northern Ireland security forces, compared to 21% of Catholic deaths. A rough calculation, then, suggests that the police and army have killed about ten times as many Catholics as Protestants. Many in Northern Ireland see this remarkable ratio as evidence of a deep-seated police bias.
That even the police recognise this as a problem that must be addressed was evident in their attendance and participation at this workshop. One suggestion discussed was from the Chris Patten (ex-governor of Hong Kong) Commission, set up as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The Commission recommended increasing Catholic representation in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as Northern Ireland’s police force is known, to reflect their proportion of the population. It spelled out steps necessary to implement such a change. Among them: offer Protestant officers over 50 years of age voluntary retirement, with a package that includes two-and-a-half-years salary (amounting to as much as 75,000 pounds) plus immediate pensions. For many RUC officers, this was far too good an offer to turn down, so many took it. In turn, that created the space to recruit Catholic police officers.
Familiar sounds
There was plenty more that Northern Ireland offered. The cherry-picking from my experiences there that’s in this article is really just to underline so many echoes an Indian might hear. Count them: Partition and its legacy; famine; mistrust and hostility between religions; one man’s criminal is another man’s hero; evidence of police bias. Even efforts at reconciliation.
Prime Minister Modi won’t visit Belfast, but perhaps he will hear some of this on Wednesday. Perhaps he will reflect on parallels to and lessons for the India he and I live in. If any.
And with all those echoes, there was one more ‒ trivial perhaps, but it rattled me even so ‒ that I first found in a book. These sentences: “[H]eavy military searches in the ... Kashmir area in February provoked a bitter reaction from local women. This escalated into serious rioting.”
Was that a reference to something that happened in India? It could have been, without changing a single word. But no. Those sentences are from a book called, simply, The Troubles. They are about Kashmir Road in Belfast, wracked by years of violence.
Kashmir, in Belfast.
I went looking for Kashmir under a Belfast police helicopter, getting odd looks whenever I asked. I didn’t get there, but looking at a map later I realised how close I had been. Kashmir crosses Cawnpore: more of India, in Belfast. Fifty metres or so up the road, I had turned a couple of corners in other directions and found myself looking at a plaque: “In loving memory of Tom Williams … who lived here and was executed in Belfast gaol 2nd Sept 1942.”
His address? 46 Bombay Street.
Corrections and Clarifications: The Royal Ulster Constabulary went defunct in November 2001 and its successor is called PSNI, the Police Service Northern Ireland.
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Here’s a four-paragraph summary.
In the 1840s, “an Gorta Mór” (the Great Hunger), often called the Irish Potato Famine, ravaged the island. At the time, many Irish depended largely on potatoes for food. So when a disease, the potato blight, decimated the crop across Europe, Ireland was particularly hard hit. The famine killed a million Irish and another million emigrated; the country’s population fell by nearly a quarter. (Imagine India losing the equivalent of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh).
The Hunger had far-reaching consequences. Largely Catholic Ireland was then part of the overwhelmingly Protestant United Kingdom, already a reason for mistrust and tension. Rightly or wrongly, many Irish saw the response of the British Government to the famine as inadequate at best. (The phrase “genocide by starvation” has been used, even in recent times and contemporary memorials). This strengthened calls on the island for Irish independence. That eventually came about in 1922, with the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
The Treaty established the Irish Free State ‒ which PM Modi will visit. Crucially, the Treaty also allowed six northern, Protestant-dominated counties to opt out of the Irish Free State. Those six counties formed what was and still is called Northern Ireland, which chose to remain part of the United Kingdom.
That Partition ‒ a familiar word for Indians ‒ was to set off another long and tragic chapter of Irish history: what’s commonly referred to as, simply, The Troubles. Protestant-dominated though Northern Ireland is, it is home to a significant Catholic minority. The Protestants saw themselves as British; the Catholics as Irish. That, and the ancient hostility between these two variants of Christianity, caused decades of bitter and brutal violence that killed 3,000 people.
A bitter divide
There are already echoes of my own Indian experience in all this. But I heard some more when, some years ago, I spent some days roaming through ground zero of The Troubles: the Falls Road (Catholic) and Shankill Road (Protestant) areas of Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast.
Several people I met ‒ journalists, academics, taxi-drivers, even the lady who owned my B&B ‒ warned me not to go to Falls and Shankill Roads. Everyone there was on knife-edge, they said, and who could predict how they would react ‒especially to a dark-skinned outsider? Oddly, the only person who told me not to worry was also an Indian: Diljit Rana, one of Northern Ireland’s most prominent businessmen (since elevated to Baron in the House of Lords). Over lunch at the Holiday Inn he owns in Belfast, he smiled and shook his head when I asked if I should anticipate any danger. “Nothing will happen,” he said. “I’ve been in this country for years and there's no real racism.”
But the walkabout was one serious, unnerving, eye-opener. There’s been so much hatred and killing that there’s actually a large wall that separates Falls and Shankill (“How can we have peace when there's reason for a wall?” was one piece of scrawled graffiti on it). Also, all through the many hours I roamed, a police helicopter hovered far above, stationary in the air. And both sides of the wall are dominated by enormous murals: often, an entire side of a building is painted with a man in a black mask, holding a long rifle.
Like the one in Shankill, embellished with a wreath, dedicated to “King Rat, Loyalist Martyr, 1960-1997.” (“Loyalist” referring to the Protestants, loyal to the British Crown.) King Rat was “martyred” in jail, shot to death by Catholic prisoners who managed to smuggle in a gun. He was serving an eight-year sentence for threatening to kill a woman. But he was also suspected of murdering a Protestant woman married to a Catholic, of murdering three Catholics in a shop, and of over a dozen more murders.
Martyr, murderer.
And Falls Road? No less plastered with murals. An especially large one remembers 19-year-old Tom Williams, “killed by the Brits in September 1942”. Tom confessed to the shooting death of a police constable, Patrick Murphy (ironically, himself a Catholic). He was executed. A priest who watched the hanging, Father Alexis, said: “At this moment Tom is a saint in heaven.”
Saint, murderer.
Bring it together again
Yet with all that to see in Belfast, my most abiding memory is of reconciliation. The 1998 “Good Friday Agreement” has brought some degree of peace to this long-Troubled land: hostility remains, but at least the two sides are now engaging in the political process instead of violence. But even more encouraging are various citizens’ groups that work on mediation and reconciliation, exploring ways Catholics and Protestants can live side-by-side.
Just one example: purely by chance, I was invited to attend a workshop for police officers from all over Northern Ireland, conducted by Mediation Network for Northern Ireland. The organisations director, Brendon McAllister, warned me that there were security issues involved in this meeting, and thus I must not reveal where it was held, nor name anyone who attended.
At the session, I learned that the Troubles have left about twice as many Catholics dead as Protestants. Only 4%of Protestant deaths have been due to British and Northern Ireland security forces, compared to 21% of Catholic deaths. A rough calculation, then, suggests that the police and army have killed about ten times as many Catholics as Protestants. Many in Northern Ireland see this remarkable ratio as evidence of a deep-seated police bias.
That even the police recognise this as a problem that must be addressed was evident in their attendance and participation at this workshop. One suggestion discussed was from the Chris Patten (ex-governor of Hong Kong) Commission, set up as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The Commission recommended increasing Catholic representation in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as Northern Ireland’s police force is known, to reflect their proportion of the population. It spelled out steps necessary to implement such a change. Among them: offer Protestant officers over 50 years of age voluntary retirement, with a package that includes two-and-a-half-years salary (amounting to as much as 75,000 pounds) plus immediate pensions. For many RUC officers, this was far too good an offer to turn down, so many took it. In turn, that created the space to recruit Catholic police officers.
Familiar sounds
There was plenty more that Northern Ireland offered. The cherry-picking from my experiences there that’s in this article is really just to underline so many echoes an Indian might hear. Count them: Partition and its legacy; famine; mistrust and hostility between religions; one man’s criminal is another man’s hero; evidence of police bias. Even efforts at reconciliation.
Prime Minister Modi won’t visit Belfast, but perhaps he will hear some of this on Wednesday. Perhaps he will reflect on parallels to and lessons for the India he and I live in. If any.
And with all those echoes, there was one more ‒ trivial perhaps, but it rattled me even so ‒ that I first found in a book. These sentences: “[H]eavy military searches in the ... Kashmir area in February provoked a bitter reaction from local women. This escalated into serious rioting.”
Was that a reference to something that happened in India? It could have been, without changing a single word. But no. Those sentences are from a book called, simply, The Troubles. They are about Kashmir Road in Belfast, wracked by years of violence.
Kashmir, in Belfast.
I went looking for Kashmir under a Belfast police helicopter, getting odd looks whenever I asked. I didn’t get there, but looking at a map later I realised how close I had been. Kashmir crosses Cawnpore: more of India, in Belfast. Fifty metres or so up the road, I had turned a couple of corners in other directions and found myself looking at a plaque: “In loving memory of Tom Williams … who lived here and was executed in Belfast gaol 2nd Sept 1942.”
His address? 46 Bombay Street.
Corrections and Clarifications: The Royal Ulster Constabulary went defunct in November 2001 and its successor is called PSNI, the Police Service Northern Ireland.
