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03 June 2009

The murder of Kevin McDaid was a lynch-mob killing - a planned attack on ‘Catholics’ by a murderous crowd without thought for the human costs or consequences. As in any hate crime, human beings were reduced to the value of some hated symbol- in this case football tops, colours, addresses and labels. All that mattered to the murderers in the Heights was that Kevin McDaid was one of ‘them’. Sometimes sectarianism can be denied- this time there can be no doubting that the ‘motive’ for murder was a hatred of others so deep that the lives of their victims were treated as secondary.

In the twisted logic of hatred, the McDaids were some sort of ‘legitimate target’,  legitimate, we can only presume,  because they were of the ‘wrong sort’.  But the only thing which strikes everyone looking on is the hatred and the devastation of the McDaid family.

The return of the violence of ‘us and them’ to the streets of Coleraine might be an isolated tragic event, were it not for the fact that it reminds us all of a pattern of fear and loathing which has deep roots around here- sectarianism and the division it spawns.  It is to be hoped that the devastation of the violence is enough to cause everyone to hold back but it does not take many incidents for people to start retreating behind the old barricades for fear that we might be next.  Already this year we have seen dissident killings and serious sectarian incidents from Rasharkin to Lurgan and from Belfast to the Fountain.  It does not take a genius to conclude that sectarianism is still alive and kicking.   All it takes is someone else in another small town to act on this logic and trust starts to weaken everywhere.  As long as ‘they’ still hate ‘us’, ‘we’ will have to defend ourselves – and so the ‘them and us’ cycle goes on.

On one level, none of this is surprising.  It is hardly news that Northern Ireland still operates on the basis of ‘us’ and ‘them’.  What is important this time is that we recognise it for what it is- a poisonous hatred which threatens to undermine the promise of a shared and better future.  By some counts, we are now fifteen years into a peace process, a process which only makes sense if former enemies become partners.  Being partners does not mean that we pretend that our differences have magically disappeared.  But it does involve a real recognition that the future for me depends on a fair and equal relationship with you and a commitment to make it work for everyone.  Enemies aim at the other’s destruction.  Partners work for the best deal for everyone- now and in the future. 

What is certain is that partnership cannot be reconciled with ongoing hatred and violence of all things Catholic or Protestant, all things British or Irish.  Them or us is the politics of exclusion, segregation and fear.  At its core is a desire to drive the other out, the politics of ethnic cleansing across the world.  What the events of the last months show is that we cannot have partnership in public and then retreat into sectarianism in private.  We cannot have peace and harmony for the international audience and ‘our old traditional enemies’ for home consumption.   When the First and Deputy First Minister stand together in the face of violence, the partnership seems real.  Yet the language of these elections still seems worryingly familiar.

 Apartheid is always about separate, but it is never about equal.  It always about keeping the other down and out, an enemy who can never be trusted who must be watched with suspicion at every turn.  The rhetoric of a shared and better future depends on establishing that we have become partners- no longer seeking each other’s destruction but embarked on a radically different chapter where the other’s fears matter, because my own security depends on seeking ways to address them. 

If anything good can come out of this terrible murder, it would be a public recognition that the sectarianism which tolerates hating another’s identity to the point of murder is a live poison which must now be finally faced and ended.  Sectarian hate crime does not come from nowhere, but grows straight out of the everyday experience of them and us.  It is all too clear that we are not yet comfortable with the truth that our former mortal enemies are now our permanent partners.  So the logic and language of them and us, of enemy tribes is still there every day in politics, and in daily life- with or without an Old Firm game.  Careless talk still costs lives.

Sharing the future here is not a choice.  Short of ethnic cleansing, it is our fate to live in a place where there will be both  British and Irish, Nationalist and Unionist, Protestant and Catholic and much more besides.  But if we are serious about making it a better future the habit of keeping the sectarian pot bubbling,  of looking out only for our own, of offering justifications for our discrimination and violence while condemning theirs, and of building ever higher walls rather than sharing the space for all,  will have to stop and the logic of partnership made into the key principle of public and community life.  We can’t go on with the old patterns of hostility and expect a different result.

Duncan Morrow - CEO

This article was printed in the Belfast Telegraph 3.6.09