Ex-Combatants, Religion, and Peace in Northern Ireland

The Role of Religion in Transitional Justice

J. Brewer, D. Mitchell, G. Leavey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137299352
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137299369
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

Studies of Northern Ireland's ex-combatants ignore religion, while advocates of religious interventions in transitional justice exaggerate its influence. Using interview data with ex-combatants, this book explores religious influences upon violence and peace, and develops a model for evaluating the role of religion in transitional justice.

1

Religion and the Northern Ireland Conflict

Introduction

Personal faith and belief are the primary indicators of religious commitment and are the obvious ways in which to assess the role religion has played in mediating decisions over time concerning the choice between armed struggle, non-violence, and peace. But the role religion plays in Northern Ireland as a means of identity construction gives it an impact through processes of cultural, political, and ethnic reproduction. Irrespective of the level of people’s personal faith, even for those who assiduously say they have none, religion in this second sense can never be avoided in Northern Ireland, for it is part – not solely, but part – of the processes of cultural reproduction. This is widely recognised, for ordinary people routinely distinguish between ‘religious Catholics’ and ‘cultural Catholics’, and likewise for Protestants. ‘We’re not Christians, we’re Protestants’, a phrase familiar at barricades and used during Orange clashes, makes this point for us very well – one of our Loyalist ex-combatants, without realising the implications of what he said, drew the same distinction in response to a question by saying: ‘On the Christian side of it, no. On the Protestant side of it, yes.’ It is the role of religion in processes of political and cultural reproduction that we explore in this chapter as a necessary precursor to examining patterns of personal faith amongst our respondents in later chapters.

In this chapter, we therefore rehearse a familiar debate and we offer no apologies for returning to it. ‘The Troubles’ was a conflict over the legitimacy of the state and access to its political, economic, and cultural resources, but religious affiliation defined the boundaries of the ethno-national groups who were in competition. Religion provided some of the cultural resources for drawing moral boundaries between the groups, religious symbols became associated with political contestation, and at certain times the churches took sides in the war. Considerable attention has been focused on whether or not ‘the Troubles’ was a religious or political conflict. While some observers seek to denude the conflict of any religious hue, preferring to present it as an ethno-nationalist conflict for which religion is just an inconvenient surrogate (for example, McGarry and O’Leary, 1995), others highlight the residual religious dimension at least at the symbolic level (for example, Barnes, 2005; Elliott, 2009; Mitchell, 2006a, 2006b).

The truth is it is both political and religious, for religion maps onto and represents real material and political differences. It is this quality – religious and not religious, political and not political, and both at the same time – that explains the blending of religious and political themes in the narratives of the ex-combatants that we will explore in the following chapters. Here we seek to establish the historical background that makes religion an issue for ex-combatants to narrate, even where they have no personal faith.

Before describing the research objectives and methodology of this research, therefore, this chapter establishes the context for this study. The first section examines the role of religion in Irish history and politics, arguing that religion and nationalism in Ireland elide – in origin, structure, and function. The second section looks at the role of religion in the contemporary conflict and outlines the ongoing cultural and social significance of religion. The third section reviews current research on ex-combatants in Northern Ireland in order to illustrate the neglect of religion.

Religion, national identity, and the Irish conflict

Studies of the history and activities of Loyalist paramilitaries (McDonald and Cusack, 2004; Taylor, 1999; Wood, 2006) and the Provisional Irish Republican Army or PIRA (Alonso, 2007; Bell, 1998; Bishop and Mallie, 1987; English, 2003; Moloney, 2002; Taylor, 1998) portray these groups as comprising secular individuals, motivated by secular, nationalist, and political objectives. When religion is mentioned, and this is done only rarely, it is usually with regard to the hostile relationships between the churches and the paramilitary organisations. Many analyses of the conflict further dissuade interest in the religiosity of paramilitaries by dismissing religion as a major factor in communal strife (for example, McGarry and O’Leary, 1995: 171–213). In general, journalistic and academic writing on Northern Ireland presents religion and violent activism as distinct, mutually exclusive spheres. This is because the conflict was itself a prism that diverted analysts from recognising religion as a positive force.

This may suggest that analysing religion in the lives of ex-combatants is a less than fruitful avenue for research, something of an analytical cul-de-sac, but a close reading of the literature reveals otherwise. It is true that paramilitaries were largely secular, but there were many exceptions and large numbers of combatants became religious, in prison or afterwards. It is also true that the conflict was primarily a clash of nationalisms – political not theological – but many writers have taken issue with the contention that religion had no significant role in the conflict or in the ideologies of Republicanism and Loyalism. It is certainly the case that in the later phases of the conflict, the churches gave little support to participants in the violence, but that did not preclude individual militants from being personally devout, nor did it mean that combatants had no attachment to their community’s faith. As Fulton (1991: 2) argues

Because it forms a principal, now strong and now weak, constituent of the two antagonising ideologies, religion enters into the existing antagonism from which open violence stems. Consequently, religion … bears significant direct responsibility for social division and indirect responsibility for violence.

The notion that religion may be ‘a principal constituent’ of both Unionism and Nationalism, and share responsibility for division and violence, is controversial. Perhaps most influential has been the rationalist critique, encapsulated in McGarry and O’Leary’s trenchant chapter on religious accounts of the conflict in their book Explaining Northern Ireland (1995). They argue that since it is possible to explain the conflict according to political and economic factors, there is no need to ascribe any causal significance to religion at all. The conflict, they say, is a perfectly secular and modern clash between British and Irish nationalism.¹ The paramilitaries are notably secular, there are few appeals to religion in contemporary political discourse, and secularisation actually increased over the course of ‘the Troubles’ (which is indeed the case, see Brewer, 2003a). Religion is only of concern to an anachronistic brand of fundamentalist Protestantism; for everyone else, religion is nothing more than an ethnic badge of identity (McGarry and O’Leary, 1995: 171–213).

This argument has been criticised from a number of perspectives. For example, Liechty and Clegg (2001: 53–62) point out that it is unnecessarily reductionist to argue, as McGarry and O’Leary do, that since the conflict can be explained in political and economic terms, it must be. Guelke (2003: 112) notes that McGarry and O’Leary overlook the prominence of religious language and images during the Hunger Strikes and in some sections of Loyalism (something we explore further below). A common theme in criticisms is that McGarry and O’Leary are working from a faulty definition of religion: religion as mere doctrine. This definition, it is argued, produces two misguided methods of measuring religion’s political influence which lead McGarry and O’Leary to underestimate it. The first method involves identifying instances in which political action is explicitly explained by religion. This fails to take into account the religious, political, and economic motivations that are likely to be inseparable for the religious person. Simply because someone couches their political motivation in solely political or economic terms – without reference to religious doctrine – it does not mean that religion is not part of the equation (Liechty and Clegg, 2001: 48–51; Thomson, 2002: 57–61; see also Hickey, 1984: 68–9). The second method of measurement involves examining indicators of religiosity and secularisation, such as divorce rates and church attendance. This ignores the fact that religion has a subtle but profound influence on people outside the churches (Mitchell, 2006a: 5).

We wish to focus on the central difficulty: the conflict cannot be reduced to a clash of secular nationalisms because those nationalisms themselves cannot be explained without reference to religion. Richard English (2011: 449) has made this point forcefully:

Any serious understanding of durable religions must be based on the recognition that, of necessity, these religions are simultaneously social and political as well as theological forces. Indeed, the idea of a major religion that is not intimately and influentially interwoven with questions of power, identity, economy and authority within wider society is one that could only be subscribed to by those who do not understand religion. ( … ) It is not just that religion’s long historical predating of nationalism warns us against casual assumption that the religious is a mere surface badge stuck on to the deeper human impulsion towards national identification; it is also that the very long interweaving of religious and national attachments in Ireland has left a legacy that cannot crudely be discarded: even in this more secular age, one cannot cast off the religious and leave the shape and inherited nature of rival nationalisms essentially unchanged. Those supposedly non-religious phenomena which some see as the real matters at issue in Irish division (national identity, cultural attachment and practice, particular historical memory) are often so coloured by competing religious inflection and inheritance that they, too, are partly religious.

The theoretical literature on nationalism and on nationalist movements elsewhere supports English’s depiction of the ‘interwovenness’ of theology and politics, and of religion and nationalism.

Three points can be made. Firstly, the role of religion in the origins of national consciousness is widely recognised. Religious myths of ethnic election have been present in cultures all over the world and have influenced the emergence and shape of modern nationalisms (Smith, 1999).² In many cases, nationalists have regarded religion as authenticating the nation, providing evidence of a common primordial encounter with the sacred (Appleby, 2000: 60). Secondly, although the social and political dimensions of religion have been obscured by the separation of church and state in the West, religion and politics are, in fact, overlapping spheres. Both make extensive claims of loyalty and both have a vision for the organisation of public life (Liechty and Clegg, 2001: 48–50). Thirdly, nationalism is itself a kind of surrogate or civic religion, both in form and function (Smith, 2001: 35–6; Guibernau, 1996: 83–4). By mimicking the symbols, language, rituals, myths, and doctrines of institutional faith, nationalism speaks to the same fundamental concerns of human nature as religion, such as our desire for community and belonging and our need to make narrative sense of our world.³ Religion and nationalism are both fundamentally concerned with identity. This is why nationalism can inspire equal levels of devotion or, in Christian language, can become ‘idolatrous’, replacing God as the object of worship. Nationalism gained strength in 18th-century Europe when religious certainties were being eroded, and thus ‘the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together’ (Anderson, 1983: 36). ‘Filling out the empty place of the Supreme Good,’ comments Slavoj Žižek, ‘defines the modern notion of Nation’ (cited in Eagleton, 2005: 94).

A brief look at the emergence of nationalism in Ireland shows that it is not possible to disentangle its political and religious origins. Belief in divine election – that Britain was chosen by God for the preservation and expansion of true (Protestant) Christianity – was widespread in 18th-century Britain and later, and historians have established that this idea was foundational in the emergence of British national identity (see Colley, 1992; McBride and Claydon, 1998; Wolffe, 1994). This is a crucial point, because it was the Protestantism of the British Crown that was the basis for Ulster Protestant attachment to Britain, not some non-religious sense of British nationality (Bruce, 2007: 11–12). The perceived political deficiencies of the Irish, and thus the unattractiveness of an independent Ireland, were regarded by Unionists as arising directly from Catholic doctrine (Hickey, 1984: 69–70; Hempton and Hill, 1992: 182).⁴ As for Irish nationalism, a sense of an existential threat to the faith of Roman Catholics has never been a motivator in the way it has been for Ulster Protestants, but Roman Catholicism has played an important part in defining Irish ethnic identity – much greater than Gaelic language and culture – not least as a reaction to the close correlation between Britishness, Unionism, and Protestantism. ‘National consciousness and Catholic faith indeed have interrelated in such a way as to make cause and effect more or less indistinguishable’ (Rumpf and Hepburn, 1977: 15; see also Elliott, 2009; O’Brien, 1994).

Recognising that the nationalisms of Ireland took root in the soil of religion reveals much about the contemporary conflict, particularly, why Ulster Unionism and Irish nationalism have so often manifested themselves with extraordinary intensity, often leading to violence, and why religion has retained an ideological attraction and relevance. In the literature on the Northern Ireland conflict, the observation that the extreme forms of Ulster Unionism and Irish nationalism are themselves very like religions, or are ‘quasi’ or ‘civic’ religions,⁵ is common (O’Malley, 1990: 158; McGarry and O’Leary, 1995: 212; Morrow, 1995: 166; Wright, 1998: 137). Wolffe argues that the power of these ideologies lay in the fact that – unlike their variants in Scotland and Wales – they became ‘religious in all senses of the word, with official religion and quasi-religion reinforcing the other’ (Wolffe, 1994: 153). In other words, political and religious leaders who viewed politics as a religious battle succeeded in inspiring their followers to see the national cause with a similar intensity of conviction, whether or not those people shared the leaders’ religious beliefs. Religion assisted in the development of a conception of national identity and national struggle that was zero-sum, a matter of life and death, and a deep-seated, even absolute, spiritual and theological battle.

Two pivotal moments illustrate the interplay of religion and quasi-religious nationalism in Ireland: the Solemn League and Covenant of 1912 and the Easter Rising of 1916. The signing of the covenant on ‘Ulster Day’, 28 September 1912, was the high point of Unionist mobilisation. The idea drew on the Scottish tradition of covenanting which itself emulated the covenant between God and the Israelites in the Old Testament. Church leaders approved the wording of the covenant and were among the first to sign; the day began with church services. The oath itself spoke of ‘humbly relying on God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted’ and of being ‘in sure confidence that God will defend the right’. The commitment was religious in its absoluteness: the nearly half-a-million signatories pledged to resist Home Rule by ‘all means necessary’ (Stewart, 1997: 62). The next day The Times described the covenant as ‘a mystical affirmation. Ulster seemed to enter into an offensive and defensive alliance with Deity’ (cited in Megahey, 2001: 170).

A few years later in Dublin, an educationalist and poet named Patrick Pearse was about to become the ultimate exponent and practitioner of Irish nationalism as civic religion, creating an ideological legacy that survives within Republicanism to this day. Pearse was a fervent, if theologically careless, Catholic who developed what has been called Republican ‘metaphysics’ (Shanahan, 2009: 40–65) – notions of bloodsacrifice, martyrdom, destiny, and inevitability – by combining elements of Christianity, mystical romanticism, and revolutionary nationalism. In his pamphlet Ghosts he made explicit his belief in nationalism as a quasi-religion (cited in Edwards, 1990: 253):

Like a divine religion, national freedom bears the marks of unity, of sanctity, of catholicity, of apostolic succession. Of unity, for it contemplates the nation as one; of sanctity, for it is holy in itself and in those who serve it; of catholicity, for it embraces all the men and women of the nation; of apostolic succession, for it, or the aspiration after it, passes down from generation to generation from the nation’s fathers.

Pearse’s biographer writes of his ‘obsessive need to bedeck word and action with a profusion of religious images, to demonstrate to friends, enemies and himself that God was truly on the side of the Gael’ (Edwards, 1990: 262). Throughout his writings, the spiritual and political mingle seamlessly: the nation is holy, the Irish people are Christ’s disciples, Pearse is Christ, Pearse’s mother is Mary, the coming insurrection is the crucifixion, Republican leaders are prophets and their writings are gospels, bloodshed brings blessing, and death leads to life. Pearse was by no means the only one of the separatist leaders to hold such views and his ideas and the actions to which they led have held great sway within the Republican tradition.

Accordingly, Seán MacDermott told members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1914 that ‘the Irish patriotic spirit will die forever unless a blood sacrifice is made in the next few years’ (quoted in Boyce, 1991: 308). O’Brien notes that even the socialist James Connolly had, by 1916, come ‘under the spell’ of Pearse’s mystical belief in blood sacrifice (O’Brien, 1994: 113). Terence MacSwiney, who was to follow Pearse’s example of self-sacrifice by dying on hunger strike in Brixton prison in 1920, said:

The liberty for which we today strive is a sacred thing, inseparably entwined with that spiritual liberty for which the Saviour of man died, and which is the inspiration and foundation for all just government. Because it is sacred, and death for it is akin to the Sacrifice of Calvary, following far off but constant to that divine example, in every generation our best and bravest have died … . No lesser sacrifice would save us. Because of it, our struggle is holy.

(Quoted in Wolffe, 1994: 150–1)

Religion and conflict in Northern Ireland after partition

As this suggests, in pre-independence Ireland, the national narratives urging separation from Britain were replete with religious symbolism. In Northern Ireland after the 1921 partition, quasi (or civic) religious and secular nationalism co-existed with, rather than replaced, religious nationalism. Within Unionism especially, a significant number of people have continued to believe that the conflict in Ireland – and thus the defence of Northern Ireland’s union with Britain – has theological significance (see Brewer and Higgins, 1998). Couple this with high levels of religious observance in Northern Ireland (see Brewer, 2003a), and it is easy to see why religion has maintained a presence in political discourse, providing a well of symbolism and explanatory myth to help interpret events, galvanise supporters, and pass on communal memory. Before examining some examples of this, it is important to set out the ongoing social and cultural significance of religion in Northern Ireland.

Not only is Northern Ireland a markedly religious society but religion also remains influential far beyond the networks of the devout. Although there is evidence of decline in recent decades, church attendance rates have traditio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction
• 1. Religion and the Northern Ireland Conflict
• 2. The Personal Faith of Ex-Combatants
• 3. Religion and Motivations for Violence
• 4. Religion and Prison
• 5. Ex-Combatants and the Churches
• 6. Perspectives on the Past: Religion in the Personal and the Political
• Conclusion: Religion and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index