In Ireland

VAST

Fourth Damien Walsh Memorial Lecture

Fr Des Wilson

7th August 2001

2nd talk

"During the past thirty years or more we have had enough experience of death in our community to make it long for society without killing and that was the theme that I would like to look at.  A society without killing.  Is it possible?  And it's very appropriate that we should do it on an occasion when we celebrate the life and the removal from us of a lovely life, Damien Walsh.  We sympathise with all the family and friends and we thank them for the courage and endurance with which they have borne such a terrible tragedy.

We came out of thirty years war with a great longing for peace, and I think that is one of the ways that we can dissolve the terrible hurt and trauma of the victims of that war is by trying to make sure that that will never happen again.  Can it be done?  And that is the theme that I would very much like to look at.

If we are to create a society without killing then it has to be done with work, but with real work.  Quite a number of us were very irritated, sometimes even angered, by some of the public gestures that were made here during the thirty years war by peace rallies, organising train journeys, releasing black balloons and white doves and so forth.  And some us felt that not only were these futile gestures but that people wanted to make them, well fair enough, why not?  If people believed, that’s a good thing to do, but is it going to bring peace?  And the irritation was, I suppose, I believe, based on the belief that it was an insult to people to tell them that they had to have balloons let off in order to remember the people whom they loved so much, and whom they have lost.  We didn't need to be told about this, we remembered only too well and therefore the peace groups who told us that we must be constantly reminded of this by letting off balloons and riding in peace trains.  These people have affronted us from time to time, although we recognise that their intentions were good, and there was also the idea that very many times peace groups wanted to achieve peace without change.  This was something that ran right through many of the statements made by churches and politicians and government, peace without change, and peace without change was simply impossible.  If it did come about, it was something about which we should be most uneasy, and we should never trust it.  Sometimes the government made it clear that while they believed that peace without change could not come about, it would be peace with as little change as they could possibly manage.

Now all the time they were telling us something we knew already, that we wanted peace without war.  What we were not told was how to bring about these institutions which would ensure that at least peace would be possible and that killing in our society would cease, at least it would cease to be a political objective.  One of the reasons why some of us were uneasy about peace movements was, that such movements had a discouraging history.  For example, there were hundreds of peace movements in Europe after the First World War.  The pacifists became very popular in many places.  People had enough of war and they wanted peace. So the pacifists were respected and they were supported.  One of the leaders of the peace groups in Europe at this time was a German catholic priest called Fr Franc Stalk, who made it his life's work to go around Europe forming peace and reconciliation groups especially among young people and especially between France and Germany.  They had peace camps; they had demonstrations, although there was enormous distrust between Germany and France after a disastrous war.  Into this peace movement came the peace people, the pacifist movements and they all began to flourish.  The trade unions joined in the peace movement; the Quakers in Ireland were leaders of it here.  As the nineteen thirties went on, however, war became nearer and when war actually happened the peace groups not only had no influence on whether there would be a war or not but they actually dissolved.

They had made their appeal to the wrong people. They had made their appeal to the people who already wanted peace, peace in the houses, the streets and the villages, not to those who wanted to create war.  The peace movements in our case as well, never addressed themselves to those who could make war; they always addressed themselves to those who already wanted peace. 

And so the war started in 1939 and the peace groups were dispersed, most of the trade unions threw in their support for the war effort in whatever country they happened to be in.  And in Belfast the Quakers who had been hailed as peacemakers between the wars, were beaten, physically beaten, in front of the City Hall, because they were undermining the war effort.  The churches which had encouraged the pacifist movement for two decades, now either stood aside or actively encouraged what was a crusade against Nazism.  Later a crusade against what was called 'Godless communism'.  There was never a church crusade against 'Godless capitalism', which seems a pity.

James Connelly thought that by creating a revolution in Ireland, he could maybe rouse the workers of the world and Europe, in order to stop a disastrous war.  James Connelly did not realise that the desire for peace was overshadowed and overcome by the desire to please governments and to make sure the people survived on the right side.  And so his revolution failed and so did the peace movement.

So it is against that background that we become uneasy about peace movements in our own situation, which were putting pressure on the wrong people because we knew that although governments told us that they were in favour of never shedding an ounce of blood for any political cause, that was not what history told us.

During the First World War, Winston Churchill decided that the British Government should send the troops to Gallipolis, among other places.  He was advised against it, but he argued that this military operation would, and this was his argument, would only cost a few hundred lives.  People like him were prepared to put down a figure on paper, as if instead of dealing with human lives they were dealing with amounts of sticks of furniture that they were going to lose.  In fact about a quarter of a million were lost in a wicked adventure.

Now we understand the mindset of people like Churchill, we understand why the appalling war crime of The Battle of the Somme was engineered.  At that time governments fought that way and indeed they knew no other way to fight.  They kept on pushing men into a hopeless battle, so that wave after wave of human beings would overwhelm the enemy who just could not keep on killing forever.  But it didn't work and one day something like sixty thousand men was killed through this immoral and absurd form of warfare.  But an interesting thing from our point of view is, that we find the same thing happening in Ireland during the 1916 rising.  The only tiny example of the same British method of fighting, you find it in the Battle of Mount Street Bridge in Dublin during that rising.  In that battle the Irish Anti-Government forces had occupied a number of buildings, finding their way blocked, British officers did in a small scale what they had done in every other battlefield.  They sent down men after men after men and the people who were in the building of course mowed them down.

So what does that say about the attitude of a government, towards human life.  It says this much, that when you hear them talking about the sanctity of human life and that no political cause is worth shedding and ounce of blood you don't believe them.  And therefore you have to be very sceptical about the governments power to create peace.  You know that it can create war!

Mr Heath's attitude to the number of troops who would be lost on Bloody Sunday, would it be a hundred, would it be two hundred, would it be a thousand.  Again he was talking about sticks of furniture.  So at that attitude to human life on the part of the government persists to this very day.

Now all that’s not to say that the people concerned with the peace movements or even the government at times are not compassionate people.  That may very well be.  But what we are trying to see is, how can we create a society without killing and we have to be very realistic about how it can be done.

The German priest that I mentioned, Fr Frank Stalk was compassionate.  He spent years trying to make friendship between Germany and France.  When the Second World War did break out, he did the best he could.  He, a German priest went and took care of French men and women who were jailed by the Germans as they advanced through an occupied France.  And he was often the one priest who was there to comfort these people, the French, Resistance people and others when the Germans shot them.  So here you had the strange situation of the man who had dedicated all those years to forming peace movements between Germany and France, now in the position of being Chaplin to a prison,  tending French prisoners whom his own people, the Germans were just about to shot dead.

In Ireland, the Quakers, having tried to prevent war had to content themselves often with providing comforts for men, women and children visiting their relatives who the British had imprisoned here.  Even in the midst of war the disappointed peacemakers didn't always walk away from it.

Now for many years therefore, we have been watching these phenomena and saying "We live in the real world and what does it need?"  There are times apparently when war cannot be avoided and yet everything possible has to be done before it becomes a war and when war does breakout, we have to do whatever necessary to stop it.  Now many non-violent means were tried by people who said "No" to oppression but at the same time wanted to avoid war.  So for many people during the last thirty years here, there were stark choices to be made.

Fr Dan Berigan of America takes the absolute pacifists view, and that is that no matter how much you are oppressed, you mustn't hit back.

There are others who take another view entirely and that is, that you not only do have the right but you have the duty to protect yourself and your family, and your own people.  And these are stark choices for people to have to make, and they have to make them in the future.

What is going on in the Turkish prisons and what went on here in Ireland.  And what was going on for thousands of years, is another example of people taking the only course that they can take, when they're absolutely deprived of justice, and absolutely deprived of the means of fighting against it.

The hunger strike here was an age-old custom and it was recognised for all those thousands of years in Ireland way back in pre Christian history.  And yet people, who said that they were upholders of the Christian tradition and of an Irish tradition, were loud in their condemnation of hunger strikers.  Thatcher, who recited the prayer of St Francis on the steps of Downing Street, which must have been the most inappropriate prayer ever uttered.  And Garret Fitzgerald, Cardinal Basil Hume all united with others in calling the hunger strike a form of violence.  Although it had been recognised for centuries as the last gesture of men and women in a search for justice in a legitimate form of non-violent resistance to injustice.

Now at the same time that Thatcher and Cardinal Basil Hume are publicly supporting the British Governments storing of nuclear weapons, as a deterrent, they were condemning the hunger strike of helpless men and woman as violence.  Now this means to say that a lot of the things, or a lot of the people we would have been looked upon as upholders of morality and as guides in all these matter of creating a just and peaceful society, that all these collapsed like a house of cards.  And all the people that we looked upon, the churches, the journalists or rather not the journalists, the newspapers, broadcasting stations etc, the universities, all of them let us down and indeed some of them were the very first.  And while we were watching people in the streets, upholding principle and even being prepared to die for principle, these great institutions into which we have so much of our hope, were saying "No, there is no principle, government needs must be paramount".  And so all the moral principles that we accepted in between the wars and before the wars were getisant.

So can we actually then, knowing the weaknesses of the institutions, create a community which is without killing?  That’s the challenge, and I think that is one of the challenges which is the most important for us to face.  The economics are very important and that’s part of it, and the political institutions are part of it, our need and our absolute determination is to create a society without killing.  That I think should be one of the greatest things we have in mind and that is one way we can pay back the tremendous debt we all owe to those whom we have called victims.  To those who have suffered especially in the last thirty years.

It is a wonderful ideal and like all ideals we have to set our sights on the best way we can do it.  In the hope that at least we can succeed in part of it.  Now there is some movement now of course on the part of the people to get rid of the killing in our society.  The present political process is designed just for that very reason, and to remove the causes of war.

There are also people who are working very hard to get rid of the death penalty.  There are people who are working to get rid of abortion.  There are people who are working very hard to get rid of death on our roads and death by tobacco or alcohol or drugs, or rather of other drugs.  And there are people who are struggling very hard to curb the arms manufacturers, who are more responsible for war more than any other body of people on this earth.  Now we were told some time ago in the United States that if we wanted to contribute to the economic prosperity of the North of Ireland, that one of the ways in which you would do it, would be to help in the development and increase in commerce of Shorts (now Bombardier).  There were very, very few of us at the time who objected.  We said we'd had all these years, decades of war.  In fact we had never known peace.  When my mother died at the age of 85, we reflected that she'd never had ten consecutive years of peace in her whole life.  That made us very angry, and it made us extremely angry when we heard somebody standing, saying, quite calmly that our future economic development was going to depend on the success of Shorts.  We should have been saying "Take Shorts out of here and give us something decent".  And the people in Derry who are now struggling against Ratheon are now saying the same thing "We've had enough of it, more than enough of it but we are not prepared now to stand back and watch while our people are forced, forced because it is the only choice they have perhaps, into making arms that are going to kill other people.  Now, all of these things are being proposed or fostered or opposed by individuals".  Well, what can an individual do in order to create a society without killing?

It is very important to remember that most of the social changes that we have ever had have come at the beginning, from the work of individuals and small groups.  Reform in the hospitals, reform in the prisons, all of that and much more came about because two or three people said "We want to know what is happening, and if its not right we are going to try to stop it".  It was amazing what happened as a result and we have to remember too, with great gratitude, that any advance in the way that prisons are run, any humanitarian advantages are made, are made very largely because of the political prisoners.  It was the political prisoners who pushed and pushed and pushed in order to get prison reform, and that prison reform of course was not just for them, eventually it was going to be for prisons in general.

Now whether you're talking about the people who went to the Greenam Common, or whether you're talking about Dan Berigan, who breaks into missile establishments and pours his own blood on the missiles, or whether you're talking about people who are struggling for prison reform here or for the Turkish prisoners, or who ever, it doesn't matter how small they are.  It doesn't matter how small the group may be, or how small the person, they are important and they could be the beginning of a new kind of society, which is what we want.

Now, we know we are not going to depend on the big institutions and one of the reasons, we can't depend, for example on the churches is that the whole Christian background is one of war.  It's astonishing that the fundamental documents of the Jewish and Christian faith are documents which glorify war, and not only that, but they actually say that God is not only condoning it, but is pleased with it.  We have to ditch all that and not be afraid to do it.  And as well as that, of course, we remember our history.  Poor old Cromwell quoted the bible as he destroyed the people, and some of our friends on the city are still quoting the bible as they did and why wouldn't they, because that bible has indeed contained some stuff over which we can't stand, and we are not going to.  Not only that, but the great institutions of learning, the universities, this university, were based for many, many years and centuries on the Old Latin and Greek way of life, and literatures.  Latin and Greek literatures were among the most violent literatures that the world has ever produced.  So, is it any wonder that when you bring up the children with a devotion to Latin and Greek culture, classical culture and also to the old testament, not regarding the changes that came about with the new testament and the life and work of Jesus Christ, is it any wonder that we create in a society where killing is not only condemned, but sometimes praised?

So can we make it happen, that we can create a society without killing?  The answer to the question weather we want to or not, is very simple, of course we do.  We'd have too many lives taken, too many people who we loved being taken away from us, like Damien Walsh and a host of others whom we all know.  We don't want that to happen ever again, but we'll have to work at it.  As individuals and groups, we have to do what ever we can to make sure that disputes are settled by discussion and negotiation rather than by force.  We have to admit that there are people for whom war or force is the first choice they make and not the last.  Now, I believe we have to make a start in our education.  We have to give people practice in different ways of settling disputes, and the sooner we start the better.

People are entitled to have differences, to disagree as well as to agree.  And therefore it is not enough to tell people, young people, for example that they have to keep quiet, or not to bother or pretend they agree with people when they don't.  Let our disagreements come out in the open, let us discuss them and let us solve them.  Very often our solution to a problem or disagreement or a feud is to get rid of the troublemaker.  Get the troublemaker out of the schoolroom, or out of your organisation, or out of the country.  Sometimes it may be necessary, but most times it isn't.  The work being done now by bodies like the Restorative Justice groups could not be praised highly enough.  Now, if we could extend that kind of work into schools and colleges, as well as our broader communities, then we have gone a good road towards the kind of society we want.  I would like to make a very special plea, and it is that we don't let our public representatives off too lightly.  One of the strange things about a democracy is that once you've created it, you are very trusting and you trust the public representatives the same way you would trust the supermarket people.  Then one day you find that you buy something in the supermarket and it stinks and you say "There's something wrong here, well you'll have to make changes", but by that time it might be slightly late.

We have European Parliament members; we have members going over to Westminster, which is not a very creative idea.  We have people in assemblies; we have people in local councils.  Now all of these people must represent our interests.  They will not be telling us what we should believe.  We will be telling them what they must do, and therefore I think we have to bring them together again, and again, and again, and say precisely that to them.  We were all delighted, all of us who are old enough to remember.  We were all delighted when after the Second World War the United Nations came into being.  Just as people had been delighted in the previous generation when the League of Nations came into being.  Then we found the United Nations was becoming a tool of the big powers and the same thing was happening once again, that had happened so very, very often.

Now, I think it would be very naïve to say that public opinion would stop all this in its tracks.  It won't.  But public opinion brought to bear on public representatives can't be ignored.  And if any disaster occurs again in the future and we haven't done something of that kind, then unfortunately, we only have ourselves to blame.  Can we do it?  YES.  Some years ago, in the eighties especially, and even before that, people were saying that Ireland had the possibility of becoming one of the richest countries in the European Union.  In the nineteen eighties, at that time that possibility was either ignored or laughed at.  But today it is happening in the material sense, and what is most important is that we will be the people who decide weather that prosperity that we are certainly going to have, is going to be used for people or war, for preserving the lives of all our citizens, or for killing for any other political reasons.  Whether our prosperity is going to be used for sharing with everybody, or just for distributing to the greedy few.  Those are decisions that we must make, not the political parties only.  So there are great possibilities and great opportunities.  I think we ought to be very optimistic, in fact more optimistic than we've ever been any time in our history.  One of the things that I think we must be more optimistic about is, for the first time in our history, whether your talking about the church or state of political parties, literature or anything else, for the first time in our history our ideas are going to count, perhaps that’s the most important thing of all.”