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IN HIS powerful recent novel on the psychological legacy of the Troubles, The Truth Commissioner, David Park has a character accuse the people of Northern Ireland of being imprisoned by a history of grievance: “they will give up anything – their wives, their money, their self-respect – before they’ll give up their past”. The terrible events of recent days, in which two soldiers and a policemen have been killed by self-styled republican paramilitaries, have shown both the relevance and the injustice of that accusation.
We have seen, on the one side, the evidence of a dramatic breach with the past. In the initial wave of disgust and despair, it is easy to lapse into a fatalistic belief that we are trapped in a recurring nightmare of violence. In fact, reactions to the killings have underlined the sheer extent of change. Martin McGuinness’s commendably unequivocal condemnation of the killers as “traitors to the island of Ireland” would have been unimaginable a few years ago. So would Ian Paisley’s description in the House of Commons on Monday of the words of a Catholic priest who led his parishioners in praying for the souls of the dead soldiers as “one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard from a man of the cloth”. As Dr Paisley put it, we are seeing “something we never thought we would see” – not just in the appalling return to political murder, but also in the way reactions to that return have not been split along tribal or sectarian lines.
