February 29, 2008
Belfast scholar: Northern Ireland conflict driven by culture, not religion
The long-standing conflict in Northern Ireland is generally described in religious terms, as a sectarian clash between Catholics and Protestants. But Belfast-based scholar Pete Shirlow looks at it differently.
“It’s never been about religion,” the researcher and author told his audience from AU classes on peace and conflict resolution last week. “Religion is basically a boundary marker.”
Shirlow described his research and work with former prisoners from both sides of the conflict who had been jailed for paramilitary violence, and provided insights into the conflict and the peace process.
The vast majority of antagonists aren’t churchgoers, he said, but view their Protestant or Catholic identities in cultural terms. The groups have interacted little in the past decades; Shirlow, who grew up in Northern Ireland, recalls the time in the early 1970s when Catholics vanished from his Protestant neighborhood and a segregated environment emerged that remains the norm today.
“There were places you went and places you didn’t go; people you spoke to and people you didn’t,” he said.
His family understood themselves as “very British—more British than the British,” he said. Growing up in a home filled with images of the royal family, he learned to interpret colonialism as “civilizing” and “rational,” a process that brought not only economic advantages to Northern Ireland but such British benefits as free health and dental care.
“There was nothing like that in Western Ireland. So we understood colonialism as rational,” he said. “The reason we disliked Catholics is because we understood their desire for a united Ireland,” which would jeopardize what Protestants felt was a more advanced society. Meanwhile on the Catholic side, colonialism was viewed as imperialism and the British as occupiers.
Once the violence began touching every family, beliefs hardened, and bitterness and resentment built up that could not be easily exorcized. But today, he said, while the tensions continue, “ . . . terrorists sit down every week and work on projects with Loyalists. These are people who were trying to kill each other for 30 years.”
He described one prerequisite for an effective peace process: “First of all, dispense with the word ‘terrorist.’ Terrorism is constructed. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, so it’s meaningless.”
No peace process can change a person’s experiences or feelings, he said. Nor can it impact the conviction that the other person in the room is or is not a “terrorist.” At its best, a peace process can encourage individuals to say, in effect, “I’m going to park my ideology, or I’m going to park my violence, but I don’t have to give up what I believe in.”
Former prisoners have been effective in “selling” the peace process, he said. They have credibility that enables them to talk convincingly with others on their side of the divide, and they can talk convincingly with young people as well. Many have also developed leadership skills and gained an education during their long years in prison and are motivated to put those skills to work.
Shirlow’s interviews with former prisoners have also shown the thinness of the ideological basis for what they did. Most admit that they had little awareness of politics, but were drawn into the movement by the groundswell of fervor and a general sense of shared identity. “If I’d talked to them 20 years ago, they would have given an ideological talk. They’d have pretended to have politics,” he said.
Shirlow’s recent book is Beyond the Wire: Former Prisoners and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland. He teaches at Queens University in Belfast.
