Speech to the Irish Association by Malachi O'Doherty
11 October 03

Tomorrow some of the greatest academics in the country will apply their minds to the questions of the relevance of religion to conflict in Northern Ireland, and there is no point in me trying to predict what they will say or undermine their theories in advance.
But I have long had a strong sense that religion is genuinely in the mix.
It is too easy to argue that the people who are violent are not religious. They are not, it is true, and they are impervious to the injunctions of the churches their parents went to; they are equally impervious to the theological changes that have undermined their simplistic assumptions.
The case for a religious root to the conflict, a live religious root still feeding it, is not necessarily a case for a surreptitious movement within the churches, poisoning young minds, though there is; it is not necessarily a case against religion or a case for saying that religion deliberately and maliciously feeds violence. Religion contributed unconsciously, for the most part, to the troubles, but cultivating narrow chauvinistic and divisive values which seemed decent once but which, when lit by the flame, imparted dignity to murder and hatred.
Let me illustrate this.
I have written before, and I write again in my new book about the obvious organic connection between the Christian Brothers in Belfast of the 1960s and the first generation of the Provisional IRA. All the senior leaders of the Belfast IRA were Christian Brothers boys.
At first I explained this as an effect of the teaching of the Brothers themselves, their emphasis on Irish nationalism, their fundamentalist religion, their cultivation of what they regarded as manly values, competitive strength for instance.
Some of these men were fanatics. Brother Gibbons would beat boys for playing soccer in the school yard. He would watch from the window to be sure they were picking up the ball in their hands and he would run out and thump them across the ear if they weren't.
The Brothers were a paradox however.
They were also committed to training us for jobs in the civil service, city hall and the GPO. They taught us not to advertise our Catholicism in front of Protestants.
The boys who got those jobs were often astonished that saved Christians working alongside them had none of the reserve they had about discussing religion in the workplace.
In a similar way, the Brothers introduced us to girls, inviting Fortwilliam and St Dominic's girls to come to ceilis they organised for us, probably in the hope that we would form strong early heterosexual relationships with marriagable Catholic girls. I had heard stories about priests coming into parish halls to flush out the dancers at midnight. The Brothers didn't behave like that. They wanted you to hold a girl's hand properly when you were dancing with her, to hold her firmly for the swing. They weren't crazed puritans.
Gerry Anderson has put it like this: the Brothers would thump you with a grin and when you were fifteen, they would let you in on the joke and did not expect you to believe the things they had beaten into you when you were eleven.
The other complication in creating a direct link between the Christian Brothers and the Provos is that it was the boys who rejected the Brothers and their values who joined the IRA.
In August 1969, the boys that I saw stealing buses for barricades were not the bright ones who had assimilated the Brothers values, who had their fainnes for good spoken Irish, who played hurley and went to Irish language masses or were members of the Legion of Mary, all pursuits that helped a boy to meet girls.
The first wave of rioters and provos were the ones who had left school at fifteen, who had not taken an interest in education, who had rebelled against the authoritarian manner of the Brothers, who had the courage to speak against them and sneer at the system, and whose company on corners was boys like themselves, restless boys.
You can't make a case that Gibbons and Beausang turned them into Provos, for Gibbons and Beausang had had no influence over them at all.
Yet, two years later, when these boys were interned, and Beausang went up to Long Kesh to meet them, what did he find? He found them saying their rosary in Irish and singing Baidin Fhelimidh and comparing themselves to the great Irish martyrs, oosing a love for a culture which they had themselves shown no interest in, and which the Brothers, for all their passion and anger, had been unable to inculcate into them.
What did they want now? They wanted Irish classes.
Explain that.
I was a good Brothers boy. In my first year at school I asked my mother to get me for Christmas, Old Celtic Romances by PW Joyce - not that other Joyce, the smutty one - after listening agog to Brother Walshe reading it to us in class about the love of Dermot and Grainne and the jealousy of old Finn.
The Provos asked me for that book in 1970 for one of their education groups. God knows where it is now.
The first generation of Provos, all natural rebels, put themselves under the tutelage of old chauvinists like Billy McKee and Sean Mac Stiofain and they must have recognised their values as the values they had shunned before, and they gave them a second hearing because those values now were accompanied by guns and sanctioned their rebel impulses.
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Now they could be approved by authority for their violence, approved by traditional authority, familiar to them but now friendly and encouraging. They would take from Billy McKee what they resisted from Gibbons and Beausang.
But perhaps the familiarity of those values made them respectable.
They could not have been roused to action by Marxists or Anarchists, but they were by Catholic Irish chauvinists. They were the only ones who could conceivably make bombing a barbershop seem like a respectable act. They were the ones with a philosophy that allowed contempt for Protestants as lower people than themselves.
The inheritors of Catholic chauvinism doubted that Protestants could get into Heaven and shunned their worship as a pallid and twisted thing. In those days it was as forbidden for a Catholic to enter a Protestant service as it was for an Orangeman to attend a Catholic mass.
But where the Orangeman or evangelical perhaps thought that the mass was a dark and evil rite, the Catholic probably thought Protestant religion was not really religion at all, the deluded at play.
The communist Joseph Law who was a Belfast Protestant tells a funny story about the different Protestand and Catholic responses to his declaration that he was an atheist. The Protestant friends said they would pray for him and hoped that in the end he would find salvation. The Catholics were hardly disturbed at all, because they saw it as a much shorter fall from being a Protestant to not believing in God. That'sa nice image of Catholic sectarianism, which doesn't really regard Protrstantism as a real religion.
Does it make any sense to talk about a difference between Catholics and Protestants? Some say it doesn't, that the terms are labels used by those who want to foment discord, and that the way out of a sectarian caste of mind is simply to abandon that division.
They say: don't notice whether a person is a Prod or a Taig. They say that if you catch yourself thinking like that, you should catch yourself on.
The insistence that these divisions are false and mischievously contrived come from the left and the right of us.
From the left, the socialists argue that sectarian conflict is manufactured by the capitalists to keep the workers at each others' throats and prevent the emergence of a united revolutionary front that could overthrow them.
From the right, lofty conservatives imagine that sectarianism is a tawdry thing that is entirely beneath them. It is the bad word at the dinner table, describing something that you need take no notice of so long as no one mentions it - and to mention it is simply in bad taste.
Perhaps I am falling for stereotypes myself here, but the two occasions on which this latter case was made to me most forcefully were both in Bangor. Indeed, I have only ever been called a bigot in Bangor for raising the spectre of sectarianism, as if it was nothing but a bad dream that would disperse if you turned away from it and thought about nice things instead.
Yet the Bangor Madame is right to banish bigotry from her table and insist that all her guests be received as individuals and not judged according to their religious background. We can give her credit for wanting not to have sectarian considerations about her, but there is a serious flaw in her belief that not talking about it will make it go away.
Perhaps what she is really up to is denying others the right to question her guest list and notice that there are no Catholics on it; or perhaps she is insisting that Catholics may come to her table but only on the condition that they permit the denial of sectarianism to the Protestants.
Yet sectarianism is the assumption that the individual you meet will be locked into ways of thinking and reacting, by virtue of a religious background, so emphatically that you have always to be on your guard.
The truth is that every individual is an exception. The true embodiment of a communal position in one man or woman is rare and horrifying when we find it. Every personal encounter with a Loyalist or a Republican, with a bishop or a pastor is an encounter with a person, most of whom have some latitude to them.
Has the left wing theory of managed sectarianism any merit.
Newton Emerson debunked it nicely in a recent column in the Irish News.
It is hard to imagine that the chamber of commerce in Belfast meets to contrive means of fostering more sectarian division, yet there is some logic to arguing that when workers in other European countries were rising up, ours were at each others' throats and a moment may have been lost for revolution.
Old socialists recall the outdoor relief strikes of the 1930s as evidence that Protestant and Catholic would pull together when they shared economic interests vested in their class power.
Yet sectarianism, as the same socialists point out to us, costs jobs. It also depresses property prices and makes housing estates and small towns, tarnished with graffiti and littered with flags, ugly and unamenable.
The flags on your street tell the world that only people from one half of the community need bid for your house. They reduce the competition and therefore the price.
Look at the little villages between Larne and Carrickfergus, in some of the most beautiful parts of Northern Ireland. No tourist will be drawn to them, no artistic community in search of peaceful environs close to the city. They are suffocating under their flags and bunting.
No one can look at them and claim that the sectarianism is in the interests of the people who live there. Their own small mindedness traps them in a stagnant property market and among people as dull and bigoted as themselves.
Sectarianism is irrational in terms of material interest.
That makes it hard for political theorist to define, if they expect that people will always ultimately work for their own material welfare.
The argument that sectarianism is not really about religion can not be built on assumptions that people will act on their material interests before succumbing to superstition.
Racism is often founded on a defence of property prices, as people imagine that if Pakistanis move into the street demand for other houses there will fall. It at least pretends to a certain practical good sense.
Sectarianism works the other way round.
It was rational for Protestant workers in the shipyard to sling Catholics into the water in 1919, to clear jobs for other Protestants returning from war.
Would that the violent impulse was always so rational, so focused on transparent self interest. It rarely has been.
And if it is not rational, perhaps irrational beliefs are informing it. That suggests religion to me or something very similar to it.
Irish Catholicism and Republicanism are closely related. Without the form of Catholicism we had here, Republicanism would not have taken the form it did.
Some people argued that religion had nothing to do with it. Proof of this is that Republicans have been at odds with the Catholic church throughout. Those who took them on face value as Catholic thought that a plea from the Pope, on his bended knees to end the violence would work. It made no impression on them at all.
When the state sought a partner to manage job creation investment in Catholic areas, it chose the church while seeking to exclude republicans, because it rightly saw that there was no overlap between them.
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Sure there are a few priests who endorsed the IRA, who never had a word of criticism for them, but they were only a few.
Yet often when the passions reached their peak there was a priest there too.
Would the deaths in August 1969 have galvanised community feeling without the help of the huge funerals on the Falls Road?
I'm not arguing against funerals, of course, but let's acknowledge their enormous binding power.
Yes church and movement competed for the people and did not collude. But they competed for the same part of their hearts; that is how they became mutually exclusive. That does not disprove their similarity, it confirms it.
Republicanism in the early twentieth century was framed as an imitation of Catholicism that might satisfy the same spiritual needs as Catholicism, with the same iconography of martyrdom, the same subservience to a dream of future perfection, even the same ideals of personal purity and discipline. The IRA was its holy orders. It replicated the catholic education system in the induction of the young into the Fianna.
When I was a teenage Catholic, I used to devour the little Catholic Truth Society pamphlets recalling the lives of the saints. The gripping part was always the death at the end. I made little distinction between the Catholic material and the similar republican material, and I imagine it was the same for many others who were engrossed in both and saw them as the same thing.
By the way, I have found out what happened to all those pamphlets, for I was looking for some to refresh my memory for my book. I spoke to Father Oliver Crilly, who for a time had responsibility for them as head of Catholic communications. He ordered them all into a landfill. The road to the Point Depot in Dublin now passes over them, and the worms devour Domic Savio and the Cure d'Ars and Catherine of Sienna along with all that impractical guidance on teenage sexual conduct and on how to make a good confession.
We were part of a catholic community then which was insulated against the state and against the Protestant world and was happy that way.
Some of the changes came early and we did not recognise them.
I think now that a turning point in the area I grew up in was the opening of a library on Slieve Gallion Drive in about 1960. This was state provision in a Catholic community, a gift from Stormont and the parish didn't know how to receive it.
Our teachers had built up our apprehensions about the library with stern lectures about how we must behave in this new place. They were challenged by the arrival of the library themselves, for it was not going to be under their control. Their fear of it seeped through everything else they did, and added to the general air of wonderment. We were bewildered that something would be built so close to the school, and for the use of the children, and yet that the teachers themselves would be uneasy about it.
On the day the library opened, dozens, of us swarmed round the door to get in. The building was like a little bungalow in its own grassy grounds, off Slievegallion Drive. It presented an almost physically intriguing allure. I stood at the back of the crowd, perhaps only inadvertently lending weight to the impression of an unmanageable rabble. None of us individually thought we were doing anything wrong. The librarians were so worried they locked up. They must have waited inside till the crowd cleared. I went home without a book.
Father Cunningham was furious. He called a special mass and ordered that we be processed to St Agnes' church to hear the sternest rebuke. "Shame on you", he roared from the pulpit. "Shame on you." But for what? There was a sin here that I did not recognise. He laid down the order that we would, in future, be escorted in groups to the library by our teachers, and would otherwise stay away. We would queue at the door. We would be filed in, and when we picked our books, we would take them to the teacher, who would approve them as suitable or send us back to the shelves with them. This arrangement did not work out just as neatly as he intended, however.
Inside the clean new building, which smelt of polish and fresh print, I saw that there was an adult section, where danger lay, and a children's section, which was much smaller, and which I suspected wasn't entirely suitable for young minds either. The woman at the desk was relaxed among all this spiritual danger. Nor did she seem frightened of us or horribly offended. Thinking about her now brings to mind a chirpy woman in a chemist's shop in Belleek who once sold me a packet of condoms. "Threes or twelves, dear? Sure you're as well with the twelve."
Her appearing at ease with the radical idea that children might want to ransack shelves of books for joy, made her suggestive to me of a larger world than the school had ever implied. My first book out of the library was about the pyramids of Egypt. Mr McEvoy checked the cover, flicked the pages and permitted me to take it to the counter. Other boys gathered up their books and showed them to him. All their rebelliousness had gone. They would acknowledge the authority of the teacher and the parish, even inside the walls of this free space. That is all that was required of them.
Mr McEvoy must have felt like a fool there. He was not an assiduous censor. He was too self-conscious to notice when my brother Roger bypassed him with a book of his own choosing. Or was it that he was simply unable to exercise authority there and knew it? Roger had discovered that when there are two separate governing authorities at work, like church and state, you are free to simply take your pick between them.
The book Roger took was about Africa, and had pictures of naked tribes-people inside. That's all I remember about it. That and the horrified whisper of the boys of our class outside: "Roger O'Doherty has taken a Protestant book out of the library."
It was no coincidence that the decline of Republican fervour of the old style happened at the same time as the decline of conservative Catholicism. Yes, it seems to contradict my theory, that the Provisionals emerged after Catholicism had been liberalised by the Second Vatican Council. But that liberalisation had not settled in Ireland. The mass was now in English and the altar had been turned round towards the congregation and the altar rails had come down, but the church had not assimilated the scale of the revolution that was overtaking it.
The Christian Brothers and the other orders were still recruiting and only a few radicals among them had reason to doubt that the black soutanes would swish down the corridors of most of our schools for a thousand years to come. Isn't that what it meant to say that the gates of hell would never prevail against the church?
Those teachers had been trained by the generation which included Father Reginald Walker. Father Walker is the achetype of the Catholic chauvinist.
The final chapter of An Outline History of the Catholic Church by Walker provides an example of Catholic fundamentalist arrogance in the generation which preceded mine, which produced the men and women who taught me as a child. Father Walker's God is a God of vengeance who had allowed the Second World War as punishment for a world that lacked faith.
"God" he explained to Irish children, "is but permitting men to suffer the direct logical consequences of their revolt against Him, to reap the terrible harvest of their own sinful sowing, and to drink the bitter chalice of their own misdeeds."
Victims were to blame for their own oppression.
Father Walker had an explanation for the suffering. "If men must tunnel in the earth to find themselves a shelter, it is because they have rejected their true religious home in God's plan for their lives."
Protestantism was to blame for that war: "The crash of ancient and majestic cities into bloodied ruins is but the outward result of the gradual inner collapse of all religious beliefs and moral standards of right and wrong in the non Catholic world since the Protestant Revolt."
Roman Catholicism, in Walker's vision, "takes the shock of assault unmoved".
He was confident that "though all else should fall, [there is] one great fabric against which cannon will thunder in vain and which will stand when the Maginot and Siegfried lines have crumbled into dust - the Catholic Church."
He had no sense that arrogance such as he indulged so unreflexively would be virtually incomprehensible within a generation.

The people who launched the Provisional IRA in 1970 were men who carried rosary beads, whose Catholicism was formed in them in the 1930s and '40s. They didn't know, nor did most people then, that the theological climate of later decades would be more liberal, so supportive of the right to individual conscience that it would be Protestant in its essentials, including freedom of conscience.
The old Catholicism believed itself to be the One True Faith, and it was the template for an equally absolutist republicanism which never doubted itself.
I wonder now if the collapse of a spiritual climate in which it was natural to think in those absolutist terms deflated the Republican dream.
No one talks like those people any more. Republican chauvinism has disappeared along with Catholic chauvinism, and the republican logic now is temporal, founded on notions of defence, or even merely of the right to retain arms as negotiating chips.
Loyalism was similarly modelled on a theology and would have been different had the theology been different. Loyalist thugs are widely seen as godless apes, far more interested in drug profits than the prophets of the old testament.
The devotion to the monarchy is essentially a religious devotion.
The commitment to the monarchy as head of state has little to no practical meaning and is a relic of an assumption, barely articulated, that it is the appointment of God.
Ian Paisley sees it as the defence of the glorious revolution and imagines that our civil rights are guaranteed by this alone. That is why we must not slide into the arms of Rome.
Paisley perceives the world as still the field of battle between these great spiritual forces, the one our divinely appointed protectorate, the other satanic.
When he confronted John Paul in the European Parliament and roared at him, he not only expected other Europeans to understand what he was doing, he expected his old adversary to recognise him, as Moriarty recognised Holmes. He imagined himself engaged in an eternal struggle on behalf of the powers of Light.
A pastor who has worked with him told me a story to illustrate this. There was a calendar for sale in a shop in Derry which depicted Ian Paisley in his doctoral robes. The joke in Derry was that a small boy had asked the man behind the counter how much the 'Batman' calendar cost. That in itself was funny enough to be passed on. This pastor later met Ian Paisley and two co-workers in Belfast and shared the joke with them. Ian Paisley didn't get it. "Who's Batman?" he asked.
That evangelical culture has its preachers who dismiss Catholics as damned souls walking and their Pope as the Anti Christ.
Loyalist protest at Catholic churches, schools and Carnmoney cemetery manages to bypass any instinct that says it is not decent to sully what others revere.
That comes in part from a conviction that religion for a catholic has simply not the same value as religion for a Protestant.
When I recorded the protest at Harryville I asked one of the pickets why he was harassing worshippers at that church. A small boy shrieked out: It's not a church, it's a fenian hole.
At the top of the Garvaghy Road I saw an orange band muster outside the church during mass and pound the drums until the mass ended and the doors opened and then the bandsmen filed formally and peacefully away.
These are people who have manners in situations where they feel manners are called for, but they regard Catholic worship as contemptible.
Perhaps that matters little more now than Catholic conservatism does, but like it, it was in the mix when the balloon went up.
I suspect it is slower to die than the chauvinistic Catholicism. It would be neat if there was a perfect symmetry between the two and it would be easier to skirt the danger of being seen to be sectarian in evaluating them. It would be handy if we could still say one was as bad as the other.
But secularisation is not happening at an equal pace in both religious communities.
It is even conceivable that if Catholics surrender their need to cling to their faith as a badge of community allegiance, the rest of it will fall away as rapidly as it has done in the Republic and that we might be left in ten years from now with a single powerful block of theological interest in Evangelical Protestantism, still telling the rest of us that we will burn below if we don't join them, still imagining themselves to be non denominational Christians, and still getting broadcast slots from which to proselytise.
I wonder if the theology of evangelicalism, interpreted in crude ways that many fine evangelical people would eschew, informs the contempt that loyalists have shown for Catholic worship and ritual, in the pickets at Harryville, at Carnmoney Cemetry. The logic of the conviction that we are damned is that the souls in those graves were not worth praying over anyway, for they are all in hell.
Yet people who are taught in school that the unsaved are damned, bewilder us when they picket Catholic churches and cemeteries. Where is the puzzle? Of course they will think of Catholics as inferior. What is it to be damned but to be of less value than those who are saved? They are taught in school and church that the Catholics are not Christian yet puzzle us when they picket Catholic churches. Why wouldn't they picket catholic churches when those churches are the meeting places for the followers of Anti Christ? It would make perfect sense within the theology of many people here to burn them to the ground, yet we effect horror and bewilderment when they are burnt to the ground.
The evangelicals seek only to convert others and have no wish to empathise. They claim, at times, a Christian love for the unsaved but it is hard to find anything neighbourly in a presumption that you belong to the devil.
Yet we find also that ordinary civic decency for most people over rides these theological convictions. Nigel Dodds, an evangelical himself, whose party leader teaches that the Pope is the antichrist, naturally and without reservation, condemns the interruption of catholic education by vandals. The logic of his theology is surely that it would be a very good thing to disrupt Catholic education.

I attracted protests when I suggested that a Free Presbyterian in the police might not be wholeheartedly commited to serving the needs, say of a catholic priest, who was, according to the Free Presbyterian moderator working for the devil. I was told that I should not impute the integrity of good Christian police officers; I don't, but I observe that their good policing overwhelms their religious values, and I am glad to see it.
The Catholic institutions have done their own damage by seeking to monopolise education for Catholic born people and producing a priestly caste which turned out to have been corroded by its own misery and emotionally deformed by its effort to live without physical love.
Theological differences obstructed reconciliation. Protestants have been stricken with horror at the sight of Catholic priests officiating at the funerals of bombers and commending their souls to God. How, they ask, could Thomas Begley be anything but a damned soul when his bomb killed him in the same instant that it killed nine others, including children? What time had he to reflect on his sin and plead for God's mercy?
From their theological perspective there is no reason to pray for this man. >From their theological perspective, the theology that admits of a point to praying for him is simply wrong and idolatrous.
And the Catholic church, by providing a funeral for him appears to be insisting on the integrity of its community and its right to exclude nobody, while at the same time complaining to other churches, parties and institutions about their associates.
Perhaps the church should have said that out of respect for the Christian and cxivic injunction against murder and for the sake of good relations with Protestants, it would bury him in private. It was unable at any time to consider this.
One reason we should reconsider the religious roots of conflict is that the other working definitions do not produce an easing of sectarianism. Republicans have scaled down their concern from national self determination to human rights. The governments toy with models of culture and language as a means of assuaging community anxieties about discrimination. The joint declaration, effectively a draft terms of settlement with the IRA, include promises to extend the signal of Irish language broadcasting and an Ulster Scots academy, as if Blair and Ahern imagine that these will help us communicate with each other more plainly.
There is not even the smallest acknowledgement in any of the peace process documentation that religious offence has been given and taken, that theological perspectives inform the belittling of our neighbours.
This is not to suppose that some theological compact is possible; if it were it might have been found long ago; but if theology is at the core of division here, and I believe it is, then surely there has to be some more rigorous discussion of theological differences between us.
Maybe if you want your children to grow up loving their neighbour you shouldn't tell them that those neighbours are damned to hell fire or living in delusion. Maybe it should be a strong social value here that such things are neither said nor implied.
And if the mellowing of passions here can be accounted for, at least in part, by secularisation then we have to perhaps expect responsible political leaders to favour secularisation rather than to bemoan it, to plan hopefully and creatively for the transition we have entered into, not to shrink from it.
The churches could not barter their theologies if they wanted, but a happy trend away from religious dogmatism carries us towards the hope of better relations between communities.
The religious legacies will expire but in their place we will have the legacy of bitterness, suspicion and vengeance from the recent troubles, of course.
But at least we might recognise that for what it is, as we failed to recognise our religious war while we were having it.

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