[Mb-civic] Irish melancholy from new and old wounds - James Carroll - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Irish melancholy from new and old wounds

By James Carroll  |  September 19, 2005

RECOVERY AND setback, accomplishment and catastrophe, optimism and 
dashed hopes -- these, apparently, are the melancholy facts of the Irish 
condition. I speak politically and personally. An ultimate breakthrough 
to peace seemed to take place last month with a formal -- if long 
overdue -- renunciation of violence by the IRA. The British government 
responded by beginning the dismantling of its military structure in 
Northern Ireland. The movement from uneven truce to declared peace by 
the most recalcitrant Catholic fighting force seemed to fulfill the 
dream begun decades ago when Derry activist John Hume invited the Irish 
(and Irish-Americans) to march to a different drummer.

But some drummers remain the same, and, alas, so do some marchers. In 
recent days, terrible ''sectarian" violence has once more wreaked havoc 
in Northern Ireland, this time in Belfast, where Protestant mobs rioted 
when authorities prevented them from taking their insulting ''Orange" 
parades near Catholic neighborhoods. Dozens of police and civilians were 
wounded, as paramilitaries attacked with assault-rifles and grenades. 
Unemployed Protestant workers, at the mercy of transformed economic 
forces that bypass their kind of labor, focused resentment on the local 
enemy, with particular anger directed at the so-called Good Friday peace 
accords, which, on the Catholic side, had reversed a dynamic dating back 
to the so-called Easter Rising of 1916.

That seems a long time ago, but in Ireland memory is elastic. The Orange 
parades, after all, celebrate Protestant triumphs of the 17th century. 
For Irish Catholics, history is defined not by triumph, but by tragedy, 
even if the memory of its worst instance is clouded. The mid-19th 
century famine, induced by policies set in London, decimated the 
Catholic population (more than a million starved or died of disease in a 
five-year period), and set in motion the great Irish emigration (with 2 
million leaving in the 1840s and 1850s).

But the ''hunger," as Catholics prefer to call it (a famine is an act of 
God; this disaster was an act of the British) did more than that. Coming 
in waves across years, the famine stamped multiple generations with its 
horrors, with results that were as much psychological as physical.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/19/irish_melancholy_from_new_and_old_wounds/
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