|
Passing
through Lurgan town centre the words 'Rosemary Nelson'
jut out from the office of the late solicitor serving
to remind travellers that beneath the apparent tranquillity
of the town a malevolence stalks which can snatch
the lives of some in an instant and in doing so change
the lives of others for an eternity.
In
those more contemplative moments free from the exigencies
of the ideology, it does well to succumb to the thought
that so much effort goes into building and sustaining
lives that it seems an act of the utmost wanton destruction
to snuff them out in the space of mere seconds. Allowing
such thoughts to irrigate the ideology may act as
a brake on barking that order that marches others
off to the gas chambers. Despite that how many of
us throughout the course of history balked from indulging
in that one second that changes everything when the
‘cause’ demanded it or said it was right?
If
ever there was a week in which a trip to Lurgan was
barely required to activate the memory bank it was
this one. Malevolent loyalist hatred has been on the
prowl for victims for some considerable period and
as recently as Sunday night devoured the life of yet
another. Gerard Lawlor was not even born when the
hunger strikes took place. Of the post 1981 generation
he had started a new generation through his daughter.
In this particular case, two generations removed from
the darkest era of the post 1960s conflict and it
gets no brighter, children are left fatherless.
Towards
the end of 1981 and before the birth of Gerard Lawlor,
a virulent loyalism stalking North Belfast had killed
Stephen Murphy supposedly in response to the killing
of the Unionist MP Robert Bradford. The coroner in
Gerard Lawlor’s case could save himself a lot
of bother if he looked at the coroner’s findings
at Stephen Murphy’s inquest. The 19 year old
Catholic victim was described as a 'poor unfortunate
boy, chosen out of spite and at random, a perfectly
innocent victim'.
While
the specificity of 'tit for tat' killings featured
prominently throughout the past thirty years loyalist
violence always had a strategic rationale to it. This
may not have been reasoned or articulated by those
in the front line carrying it out. Those, Danny Morrison
wrote, were ‘people whose brains have never been
taken out of the wrappers, have never been used.’
For many of them a mixture of bigotry, hatred, supremacism,
defenderism, peer expectation, vengeance-seeking and
fear fed into their decision on the day to do what
they did. But inseparable from all the individual
motivations was the collective strategic factor that
nationalists could be policed, their political representatives
culled, their political sharpness blunted, their minor
advances thwarted if loyalist violence could raise
its ugly head, hissed and bared its fangs. The unionist
'strategy of threat' had worked well against Britain,
even going a long way in persuading the latter to
set up the orange state. So why not against the much
weaker nationalists? What was ‘tit for tat’
about the violent loyalist response to the Anglo Irish
Agreement of 1985? Despite all the republican theorising
about the need of 'British imperialism' to maintain
territorial acquisition of part of Ireland - although
imperialism seemed to work quite adequately elsewhere
without such acquisition - the British stayed primarily
because of that strategy of threat.
On
the night Gerard Lawlor may not have died had someone
in the Glenbryn community not been shot from Ardoyne
in an attack every bit as provocative as those on
the many Catholic targets that evening. But is there
any room for doubt that even without the Glenbryn
incident nationalists in North Belfast would still
be getting targeted? It is ‘tit for gains’,
no matter how small, not for ‘tit for tat’.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
